3) indexing – themes and emerging sub themes were labelled and indexed; 4) charting – each framework was converted into a series of thematic charts; 5) mapping and interpretation – the key characteristics across all the data were mapped and interpreted.
For each emerging sub-theme, a summary explaining the behaviour, attitude, experience, context and ritual around observed defecation practices and patterns was prepared, providing the basis for the results presented in this paper.
Codes were coalesced to identify manifest categories and emerging sub-themes and latent themes.
Constant comparison technique [ 17, 18] was used to evaluate how emerging sub-themes correlated or differed with each other.
Main codes were established for the core questions in the interview guide; sub-codes were inductively formulated to identify emerging sub-themes.
While there was general agreement between the two focus groups in terms of the emerging sub-themes, there were two sub-themes which emerged from only one of the focus groups (Table 3).
They did this by selecting three transcripts, re-reading them, assigning meaning units to each response and codes to each meaning unit while also taking notes on emerging sub-themes.
Emerging sub-themes fell into five main categories: perceived ability in clinical management, different learning opportunities experienced, the impact of variations in approach to end of life care, the role of the specialist palliative care team (SPCT) and suggestions for improvements to training.
The emerging themes, sub-themes and relationships are described below.
These codes were further grouped into families and retrieved as emerging themes and sub themes.
After further reading, emerging themes and sub themes iteratively altered the charting process, the data were finally added to the Framework before review by the study team [ 36- 39].
