Interview data analysis

Key to an interpretative phenomenological analysis is providing both a descriptive account of how participants make sense of their experiences and an account of the analyst’s interpretation. The analysis is a “joint product of the participant and the analyst” Smith et al., (2009, p. 80). The conduct of analysis involves five distinct phases to bring an interview to its completion. Phase one is where the researcher immerses them self in the data. Transcribed interviews are read and re-read whilst listening to the original recording of the interview. This phase allowed errors in the original transcript to be corrected. Segments of the interview that were deemed inaudible when first transcribed were understood and transcribed by the researcher during this phase.

Phase two involves the initial noting where the researcher begins to draft exploratory comments on the data.231 _{There are no rules to the note-taking, the researcher notes anything} of interest or memory from the recording of the interview. Familiarity with the transcript begins to grow in this phase, as do awareness of how the participant uses language, talks about, and understands their experience, and what aspects of their experience have been sources of pain, joy or upset to them. The aim at this phase of the analysis is to produce a comprehensive and detailed set of comments and notes on the data that will assist the researcher in the following phase.

There are three processes of exploratory commenting, descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual, each with different focuses that are useful analytical tools to approach data.232 Firstly, descriptive comments have a focus on the content of what the participant has said, it is basically the subject of the talk. These types of comments have a clear phenomenological focus and are likely to describe things that matter to the participants, such as key experiences in their lives and the meaning they associate with these experiences. Secondly, linguistic comments explore the participant’s use of language. The researcher notes any changes in tone, fluency (articulate or hesitant), pauses, laughter, tears, silences, and any metaphors used by the participants. Finally, conceptual comments focus on engaging at a more interpretive and conceptual level. Conceptual commenting represents a move away from the claims of the participant toward an overarching understanding of the issues being discussed. As mentioned previously, you are attempting to understand the part by looking at the whole. This type of comment is more difficult for the researcher. You can draw on your own experiences, understandings and perceptions, and/ or professional knowledge to interpret the participant’s data, what (Smith et al 2009, p. 89) describe as “personal reflection to conceptual coding”.

Phase three initiates the process of developing emergent themes. The exploratory comments containing the descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual data are the focus for this phase of analysis. There is an analytical shift to working with initial exploratory comments rather than the transcript data. Again, the whole of the interview becomes a set of parts for analysis. The main aim of this phase of analysis is to transform the exploratory comments into themes by creating a concise word to describe what was important in the participant’s comments.233 _{It is crucial that the researcher captures what was important for the} participants in the telling of their experience and the themes need to reflect both the participant’s words and the researcher’s interpretation. Essentially, themes should capture the participant’s understanding of their experience.

Phase four involves a search for connections across themes. The analyst brings together the emergent themes into clusters to group together patterns and connections, ultimately

232 _{See Appendix 12 – Three processes of exploratory commenting. Descriptive (Blue), Linguistic (Red) and}

Conceptual (Green).

233 _{See Appendix 13 for an example of the development of emergent themes (emergent themes left-hand}

aiming to respect convergences and divergences, and commonality and individuality (Ibid, 2009).234 _{In Phase five, the researcher devises a graphic representation of emergent themes} (table of themes). Each theme is annotated with a page and line number, and keywords from the participant’s transcript.235 _{Finally, themes identified are utilised to create a} superordinate theme from the participant’s data.236

Superordinate themes are developed using abstraction or subsumption. Abstraction is where the analyst puts like with like and develops a new name for the cluster of emergent themes. Subsumption follows the same process as an abstraction but the emergent theme itself acquires a superordinate status (Ibid, 2009). In the current study, abstraction was used to develop three superordinate themes, 1) power, context, and impact of an abusive relationship; 2) making sense of an abusive relationship; and, 3) the experience of help- seeking.237

This five-stage analysis process was repeated for each of the nine interviews. Each interview was approached on its own terms in keeping with the idiographic focus of an IPA analysis. What the researcher learned from the previous interview had to be ‘parked’ as she engaged in analysis with the next case. This task proved difficult as inevitably one is influenced by what you have already discovered. However, by systematically following the five distinct phases of the analysis process, each case was analysed on its own terms, thus allowing for the emergence of new themes, and the development of existing themes with each case. When the analysis was completed for the nine interviews, the recurrence of themes was measured across cases. Emergent themes (and the subsequent superordinate themes) were classified as recurrent if it was present in at least a third of the sample. 238

The next section moves on to describe the ethical considerations, obtaining informed consent, and the lengths taken to protect participants over the course of participation in the study.

234 _{See Appendix 14 for an example of the process of clustering themes.} 235 _{See Appendix 15 Table of emergent themes.}

236 _{Appendix 16 Developing super ordinate themes.}

237 _{See Appendix 17 Schematic representation of the superordinate themes.}