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Table 1 Steps of text condensation

From: “Becoming myself”: how participants in a longitudinal substance use disorder recovery study experienced receiving continuous feedback on their results

1.Becoming familiar with the data through thorough reading of the transcribed interviews, forming a main impression of the experiences of the participants, and identification of potential important themes. A theme was defined as a verbalization capturing an important element of the data in relation to the research question, representing a patterned response in the dataset.

2.Generating initial codes, which were defined as the most basic segments of the raw data that could be assessed in a meaningful way regarding the phenomenon.

3.Searching for and developing candidate themes and sub-themes. Remaining codes were set aside in this phase in a separate category for the purpose of being further analysed and incorporated when appropriate.

4.Reviewing themes to develop a coherent thematic map and considering the validity of individual themes in relation to the dataset.

5.Defining and naming themes. Further refining and defining themes, identifying the essence of themes, identifying sub-themes 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 ended.

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

7.Last, the tentative model of findings, with illustrative quotes, was sent to two fully recovered service users who served as critical auditors assessing the interpretations made through our descriptions of the central organizing concepts.