Steps | Procedures |
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Step 1- Create a retrieval table using Excel software to display entries of blogger testimony | Define 16 general categories of empirical data: chronological ID number, blogger’s fictitious name, sex, age, PC stage, exams undergone, comments about PC-related exams, treatment undergone, comments about PC-related treatments, experienced complications, comments about PC-related complications, message topic, message tone, message goal, and number of posts; Populating the table with retrieved data with distribution of categories by rows |
Step 2- Retrieve testimonial content | Critical reading to retrieve content relevant to research questions, select and compile content as incidents in the retrieval table cross-referenced by the categories listed above, count all entries per category, interpret content in table vertically and horizontally. |
Step 3- Re-order the categories of empirical evidence | Rank data by frequencies from the highest to the lowest incidence. |
Step 4- Conceptual reduction | Rearrange the 16 categories of data to 5 key topics and 13 key features (see Table 2), reduce 16 general categories to 7 major categories and 25 sub-items, identify testimonies per sub-items and their respective frequency, and create a summary table (see Table 3) |
Step 5-Conceptual correspondence | Attribute categories of data according to their fit with the four basic dimensions of the QOL conceptual framework. |
Step 6-Verbatim search | Identify quotes that are representative of each of the four basic dimensions of the QOL conceptual framework. |