Interviews and focus group

Structured interviews were conducted in Study 1, Study 4 and Study 5. The interviews were carried out in B&H, with representatives of the cancer-affected population. All interviewees were informed about the research, their right to withdraw, and asked to sign the consent to participate. The purposive method was used in sampling. Interview invitations were sent out to the following:

 President and founder of a cancer association for breast cancer sufferers;  Members of a cancer association that is active in a smaller B&H city;  A medical doctor who was a cancer patient;

 Two acquaintances of the researcher; a former and a current cancer patient;  Cancer association for children fighting cancer;

 Two university students who recovered from cancer they had as children. The invitation was also posted on:

 PORT Association’s Facebook page;

 MladiCe BiH – a Facebook group of young adults who battled cancer as children or are still battling it;

 and twice on the klix.ba [264] cancer forum (December 2015 and February/March 2016).

There were several interview rounds: the first with the founder of the PORT Association; three more with different representatives of people affected by cancer as potential users of the PORT website. Throughout this research, 25 people were interviewed.

The founder of the PORT Association was interviewed in April 2014 in Sarajevo, B&H, for approximately one hour. The aim of the interview was to obtain information about the website PORT Association used at that time, the availability of personalisation on health websites in B&H, or the reasons for the lack of it.

In the first round of interviews with the representatives of the cancer-affected population,

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(women, cancer associations’ members) were interviewed about the state of healthcare

for this population in B&H and their use of health websites for cancer information. Seven participants were interviewed with the aim to clarify the effect of emotions when informing oneself about cancer.

The second round of interviews with cancer-affected people aimed at gaining a better understanding into target user preferences between no personalisation, generic personalisation and emotion-based personalisation on a cancer website. Four people

affected by cancer from B&H were interviewed in March and April 2016. The interviews were organised in public places, and one was conducted via Skype. The interviewees participated in the experiment where they interacted with three versions of the PORT website with different levels of personalisation, which were shown in a random order to each interviewee. The researcher provided a laptop with an Internet connection to access the PORT website. On average, the interviews lasted between 1 and 1.5 hours. A more detailed overview of the Study 4 interview, including its methodology, questions and responses is provided in Appendix I, while the interview findings are presented in Chapter 6 (Section 6.5.4.1).

The final round of interviews (part of Study 5) was carried out in March 2017, in Sarajevo, B&H. The aim was to interview people who were or are currently battling cancer, and specifically repeat visitors, i.e., long-term users, who have become familiar with the PORT website and its functionalities, by using it over a certain period of time. The interviews followed up on the final research results related to: the type and level of personalisation preferred by users for a cancer website; the type of personalisation features users like and dislike on the PORT website, particularly focusing on the emotion-based personalisation features.

The interviewees were two cancer patients – young male, cured from osteosarcoma; and a female in early thirties, currently being treated for lymphoma. Both interviewees have previously learned about the PORT website and have used it over a certain period of time; thereby these interviewees can be considered representatives of long-term website users.

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Furthermore, within the final round of interviews, a focus group with adolescent cancer survivors was formed, to discuss the level of personalisation they preferred on the PORT cancer website. Three females and two males, aged 16 – 18, who are members of the MladiCe B&H – a network of young cancer survivors from B&H, participated in the focus group meeting.

The duration of the interviews was between 1.5 and 2 hours. The focus group meeting took approximately 1 hour. Unlike the previous interviews where participants explored the website themselves, in these interviews I demonstrated all three PORT website versions - without personalisation, with generic personalisation, and with emotion-based personalisation – and pointed out the differences. The websites were shown in a consecutive manner, starting from the version without personalisation and ending with the emotion-based personalisation. For each website version, the features and content which were in common with the other two website versions were pointed out, as well as the unique functionalities. For generic personalisation, I showed how providing different user information, defining interests and expressing preferences through content rating, affected the changes in content recommendations. Comparatively, I demonstrated that, in addition to the previously listed user information, the website with emotion-based personalisation also required collecting emotions at different stages of website use. Furthermore, I pointed out that the changes in emotions reflected on both content recommendations, as well as the adaptation of website features and content.

The interview questions, that followed after the website showcasing, first expressed what this research has so far found on a particular topic, then asked the interviewees about their opinion why such a finding was obtained, as well as what their preference or choice would be. Appendix J provides a more detailed overview of the interview procedure and the list of questions asked, while Chapter 6 (Sections 6.5.4.3 and 6.5.5.1) and Chapter 7 (Section 7.6.5.3) show the interview findings.

In analysing qualitative data, numerous techniques are used, of which the most commonly mentioned in the literature are: content analysis, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, qualitative comparative analysis and grounded theory [279-281]. This

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research employed the most commonly used approach in qualitative research of discovering common themes in the gathered data via the thematic content analysis [282]. Given that the interviews performed in this research were guided by a set of questions, the main topics of the questions were used as the themes by which the interviewees’ responses were categorised (see Appendix I).