The provisional themes were reconciled with the practice change framework [ 6].
Thereafter we developed a preliminary analytic structure from the provisional themes to form the basis for identification and explorations of commonalities and differences among and between the experiences of participants [ 18, 28, 29, 31- 33].
Although there is a discussion on the concept of data saturation, in the context of this study which was focused and involved a relatively homogeneous population, data saturation was considered to have occurred when the researcher was not identifying any new themes or codes within the provisional themes in sequential interviews, and thought this would be unlikely in subsequent interviews.
In order to develop descriptive themes, three reviewers independently coded this text in 10 original papers – these were chosen as they covered different conditions and provided a breadth of findings – to identify provisional themes according to meaning and content (MS, NR and SW).
We copied text about barriers and incentives to partograph use into a table and rearranged it into provisional themes, which identified that reported issues for use were predominantly about individual professionals in the context of their working environment, rather than concerns about the evidence-base for partographs.
The initial codes will then be collated into a provisional set of themes with accompanying, relevant data.
We met to agree these themes and to develop provisional definitions of the main themes, then independently reread the same transcripts to identify key issues or categories within themes, and met once again to agree working definitions of categories within themes.
After 14 interviews, a provisional list of emerging themes was compiled, which was then used together with the list of the 'set themes' to support further data analysis and was subsequently finalized.
Next, in the Indexing stage, DJ coded the data, matching it to the themes in the provisional theoretical framework using NVivo 9 software (QSR International) revising or merging themes and creating new categories as necessary.
