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Table 2 Recommendations for the reporting of secondary analyses of qualitative data and measures taken

From: Older patients’ attitudes towards and experiences of patient-physician end-of-life communication: a secondary analysis of interviews from British, Dutch and Belgian patients

Recommendation to ensure rigour in secondary analysis of qualitative data

Measure taken

Information about the discursive context of interviewee's responses.

Detailed transcriptions, transcribed verbatim, were available.

Information about the discursive history of interviewee's responses.

Whole interviews were available to at least one of the researchers involved in the secondary analysis rather than just the relevant sections.

Information about background characteristics of interviewer and interviewee.

Field note summaries (interview ‘pen portraits’), included information about the participant’s gender, age, socio-economic status, residence, family situation, key life events and the context in which each interview took place were provided.

Information about the place, time and setting of the interview, such as presence of third persons.

Information included in detailed field note summaries.

Information about the composition of the secondary dataset.

Sampling frameworks of the primary studies and the selection of the subset used in the secondary analysis are described in the methods section.

Funding of the primary and secondary work.

Funding information for the primary studies is included in Table 1. Additional funding sources for the secondary analysis are included in the acknowledgements.

The relationship of each of the authors to the data.

At least one researcher from the original study was available to provide further information on any contextual queries (ShP, BP, RD). The original researchers were not however involved in the re-coding of the data (conducted by NE and RP).

Information about informed consent.

Ethics and informed consent are described in the methods section.

Rationale for approach used in secondary analysis and a description of analysis procedure.

Rationale for the thematic analysis is described in the methods section.

Information about how the data were managed.

Data were managed using Atlas ti qualitative data analysis software.

Information about how the rigour of the analysis was established.

Details provided in this table.

Information about how the ‘fit’ of the data was ascertained.

At least one researcher from the original study confirmed the fit of the resulting themes.

Details of limitations.

Limitations are outlined in the limitations section.