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Table 1 Overview of the Analytical Process

From: From early detection to rehabilitation in the community: reading beyond the blog testimonies of survivors’ quality of life and prostate cancer representation

Steps

Procedures

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.