The final list was refined through discussion, grouping of concepts to avoid redundancy, and feedback from other working group members not present at the initial discussion.
The themes were further refined through discussion between the authors.
Questions were translated from English into other national languages, back translated and refined through discussion across the five research centres.
Transcripts were coded independently by several members of the research team so the coding frame could be refined through discussion.
The toolkit was refined through discussion with the PSC and international expert panel in light of the results.
All the authors were involved in the data analysis, and categories, themes and comparisons between the two data sets were negotiated and refined through discussion between them.
Ideas were further refined through discussion at the Health Systems Research symposium in Beijing in October 2012, through comments from members of the online PBF Community of Practice and Beijing participants, and through discussion with PBF experts in Bergen in June 2013.
3 Though self-learning via access to published material is of undoubted importance, medicine is an apprenticeship and knowledge is largely obtained and refined through discussion with colleagues; both seniors and peers.
We then inductively analysed the categories for recurring themes based on frequency and salience (or agreement among participants), in discussion with LL. 29 30 After initial analysis, emerging themes and subthemes were refined through discussion within the research team, consisting of experienced social scientists, clinicians and medical informaticists.
The content of the program theory was developed through the first author's observations of the organization of supervision of ANs in this setting from previous field work, and was refined through discussion with Guatemalan nurses working in the setting [ 22].
These were subsequently refined through discussions among all the authors in an iterative process.
