Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
by returning them to the patients for comment, analysis of the data
was begun. Decisions were made as to what meaning could be
attributed to the words and what implications the words had in
relation to the topic under investigation, which was the
development of a conditioning response in patients completing daily
diary cards.
The questions from the diary cards were used as a framework to
obtain the information that had been collected (see table 2).
Table 2 - Reference coding of questions from the taped
interviews
1. How did they find the presentation of the diary card and
how easy did they find them to use?
2. Did they recall how many episodes of sickness that they
had during their chemotherapy
3. Was their sleep pattern disturbed?
4. Did their fluid or dietary intake alter?
5. If so was it due to nausea or vomiting?
6. Were their normal activities disrupted?
7. Did they use rescue sickness medication and if so did it
help?
8. Did they ever feel sick before their treatment started? (ie
24hrs before)
9. When did they complete the diary card?
10. Any other comments?
By using this method, a reference code could be put on the raw
material very easily. Each piece of raw material was allocated with a
reference code ranging from one to ten as indicated in table 2. Each
separate item could then be identified exactly in terms of where it
should be located. The importance of this was twofold: when
analysing the data it enabled a return to points in the data which
were of particular interest and it also avoided getting muddled and
losing the place where the raw data was originally located.
It was then possible to begin ‘open coding’ and categorising the
data. The aim of open coding is to discover, name and categorise
phenomena and also to develop categories in terms of their
properties and dimension (Strauss and Corbins 1990). Following
close scrutiny of the transcripts, field notes and text from the diary
cards, comments and reflections were added in the margins
alongside the raw data, and as the analysis progressed new
interpretations were added to some of the data. Memos were kept
as reminders of any new thinking on facets of the research. The
memos also provided a log of the developing line of thinking which
helped with an audit trail. In this way patterns and processes,
commonalities and differences were identified (Miles and Huberman
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