Table 1 Steps of Text Condensation

1.

Becoming familiar with the data through thorough reading and re-reading of the transcribed interviews. Further, interviews were analyzed paragraph by paragraph to form a main impression of the experiences of the participants and to identify meaning units. A meaning unit is a basic text section that encapsulates one aspect of meaning as it relates to the experience of the informant and is identified by a spontaneous shift in the meaning of the text [41].

2.

Generating initial codes. A code consists of a coherent set of ‘meaning units’. These were further divided and sub-divided into groups.

3.

Searching for and developing candidate themes and sub-themes. A this stage a theme was defined as a verbalization capturing a set of important codes of the data in relation to the research question, representing a patterned response in the data set. Remaining themes were set aside at this phase in a separate category for the purpose of being further analyzed and incorporated when appropriate.

4.

Reviewing themes to develop a coherent thematic map and considering the validity of individual themes in relation to the data set. This is a process of checking that the suggested themes, on a semantic level, actually reflect the raw data.

5.

Defining and naming themes: Further refining and defining themes, identifying the essence of themes, identifying subthemes and summarizing the contents of the main themes into what each researcher considered to best represent participants’ experiences. When our refinements no longer added substantially to the themes, the analytic process was closed.

6.

To determine the relevance of a particular theme we both counted the frequency of the relevant meaning units combined with our interpretation of how central the theme was perceived to the recovery process.