I used Smith et al. (2009) to guide my analysis, and in line with qualitative research approaches I adopted a flexible approach. As Smith et al. (2009) encourage, researchers are not to be bound by their suggested steps. As a novice researcher I welcomed the suggested steps to support me in feeling able to manage the data, yet I simultaneously encouraged myself to remain discerning, adapt it as I felt appropriate with the purpose of supporting my personal journey of analysis. This enabled me as researcher to maximise the use of my interpretations and psychological thinking that contributed to, and added value to the process and construction of the findings. I also held a piece of advice I was offered in mind to “trust in the process” and found this a useful reminder of the repeated hermeneutic circle in moving between the whole illuminating the parts and the parts illuminating the whole. I adopted the process of the recommended six steps below:
1. Reading and re-reading
I transcribed the interviews myself and found that doing this in addition to then reading through the transcriptions with the recording playing simultaneously, enabled me to suitably immerse myself in the data. I made notes of my initial responses, connections, associations and ideas as well as marking notes of sections that resonated strongly with me.
2. Initial noting of exploratory comments plus deconstruction.
This is a step that supports the expanding of the data and enabled a deeper level of familiarisation of the content of the data. An extract of this stage of analysis can be found in Appendix T. Guidance and examples from Smith et al. (2009) was used to support my understanding of, and determine the difference between the three types of exploratory comments, descriptive, linguistic and conceptual. Descriptive comments focused on the content and subject of what the participants said focusing on key words, explanation and understandings, taken at face value. Linguistic comments focused on the specific use of language by the participants such as metaphor, repetition, pauses, laughter. Conceptual comments are the most interpretative, taking a more interrogative stance and involved moving further away from the text, yet remaining inspired by the words of the participants. This process allowed room for noticing the way descriptions were verbalised and also offered an opportunity to inspire riskier leaps in interpretation and associations that came to mind, adding depth. The deconstruction was supported through de-contextualisation strategies such as finding that reading certain sections in reverse sequence supported my linguistic comments, in particular noticing repetitions of words and phrases.
3. Developing emergent themes
Following the expansion of the data, this step now has the purpose of reducing it. During my first attempt I related the experience to that of being in a “deep bowl of spaghetti” (Wagstaff et al., 2014), immersed in masses of data and consequently
generating too many descriptive emergent themes. This became apparent both by having a high number of emergent themes at the end of each interview and also at the next stage of searching for connections across themes where I noticed that the connections I was making were remaining at quite a descriptive level. I repeated this stage for a second time, taking more leaps in interpretations and reducing the data. An extract of this step of analysis can be found in Appendix Q. I found that keeping in mind the principle of staying ‘experience-close’ (Smith et al., 2009, p. 91) in interpreting what I thought the experience of the participants would have been, supported me in adding depth and richness to my interpretations. I also noticed that the second time round I had shorter and more ‘pithy’ (Smith et al., 2009, p. 92) emergent themes which I believed captured the essence better and were a reflection of my themes being less descriptive, with “enough particularity to be grounded and enough abstraction to be conceptual” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 92). Doing this stage twice, I believe enhanced my familiarity with the data and also created space for another hermeneutic circle of movement between the part and whole.
4. Searching for connections across emergent themes
Smith et al. (2009, pp. 96–99) describe five ways one can search for connections across themes, through abstraction, subsumption, polarization, contextualisation, numeration and function. I first listed all the emergent themes of an interview chronologically, and then used an Excel spreadsheet in order to spatially arrange the themes as I saw them relating to each other. At this point, some themes that arose in the text but did not seem to reoccur or relate to a forming group with others, were
discarded. This process of grouping these spatially arranged themes, felt similar to that of an “accordion” (Wagstaff et al., 2014) where I felt that the expansion and reduction of the groups could occur infinitely. I repeatedly referred back to the part of the transcript where the theme was identified, checking the context of the theme and repeating the hermeneutic cycle. After grouping the emergent themes, I then identified the key words or quote that I felt best captured the theme, and listed them alongside the grouped emergent themes. When cross-referencing the corresponding key words or quotes that emergent themes were rooted in, some emergent themes were moved under a different subordinate theme from which they were originally placed. This process enabled me to feel more secure in validating my justification for each of these groupings, keeping in line with the principle of ‘thoroughness’ (Yardley, 2000, p. 221) discussed in more detail later. Please see Appendix R for an example grouped themes with quotes and emergent themes discarded at this stage.
5. Moving to the next case
In moving to the next case Smith et al. (2009) encourage the researcher to try and bracket the ideas from the previous case in order to keep to IPA’s idiographic commitment. I found leaving a space of time between participants helped with this, but recognise that this bracketing is limited, and some ideas from the previous participant inevitably remain in mind.
6. Looking for patterns across cases
This is where I looked to see if there were recurrent or similar themes or ideas that were experience and shared by more than one participant and prevalent in more than half the participants (Smith et al., 2009, p. 107). For this stage, I cut out the headings of the grouped emergent themes (subordinate themes) on to coloured pieces of paper, where each participant was a different colour. I found a large table surface where I could move about the subordinate themes spatially as I felt they related to each other (a provisional grouped arrangement of sub-ordinate themes can be found in Appendix S). I found this step particularly exciting as I saw, for the first time commonalities across participants. I included grouped subordinate themes that appeared in at least three out of the seven the participants as deemed of acceptable quality by Smith (2011a). This arrangement took around two to three attempts before the final one, which then changed again as the analysis continued after I entered it into a table where I then developed the superordinate and overarching theme titles. Smith et al. (2009) encourage a novice researcher to use their guidelines to support the process of analysis and not view them as prescriptive. Having reached a point of getting to 13 super-ordinate themes, with this in mind, I was encouraged to add an extra step of organising these super-ordinate themes adding another level of reduction of the data. No themes were discarded at these stage, and all were included in the final groupings.
Finally, I drew out a diagram to reflect how I found them to relate to each other spatially. In writing up my findings, I continued to make connections that I had not
noticed during these six stages. This led me changing the name of one sub-ordinate theme for one participant and being more receptive to the pertinence of another subordinate theme for another participant adding it to the findings later in the process.
It is the above six-step process that supported me as researcher to: (a) Remain committed to the personal, subjective lived experience or ‘experience close’ and meaning-making of this; (b) Move cyclically between the part and the whole; (c) Maintain the double hermeneutic of me as researcher making sense of the participant making sense of the phenomenon of supervision; and (d) Emphasize both commonality and divergence within and across participants Smith et al. (2009). It is important to remember the subjectivity of these findings and that a different researcher would have likely made different interpretations, resulting in different themes.