Thesis

CHAPTER 3 62 the chosen technique was used and judged as successful or unsuccessful. When it was not successful, it was adapted to the child by making it easier or more fun (in order to enhance communication). An in-depth description of the methods used and the decision-making algorithm is presented in Steultjens et al. (submitted). The utilised interview techniques, parental involvement and interview locations are presented in Table 4. During the interviews, two children were not able to provide their own perspective on everyday activities due to cognitive limitations and communication difficulties. In one case, the child confabulated, and in the other case the child communicated through non-verbal signals (eye blinking and facial expressions), which were difficult to interpret without involving the mother. The interpretations were examined with the videotape, and it was unclear whether the researcher’s interpretations were correct. Whereas the aim of this study was to gain insight into the child’s perspective, these interviews were not analysed. As a result, only seven interviews were analysed. The two children whose interviews were not analysed are shaded in grey in Table 1. After the interview, a summary of the children’s activities and experiences was sent to the children and their parents. To enhance the interpretative rigour of the outcomes, parents were asked to check the summary and provide a reaction. Parents gave their written reaction if the summary was adequate or if information was incorrect or incomplete. This member check resulted in some small additions that contained the daily activities of the child. For example, a parent mentioned that the child also went to physical therapy, but this event was not mentioned during the interview. These additions were added to the transcript that was used for the analysis. No additions or corrections on the other topics were provided by the parents. Data analysis The interviews were recorded on videotape, of which the audio was transcribed. Non-verbal responses (for instance, eagerness, happiness, eye-blinking, irritability or looking at parents), based on the video footage, were also added to the transcriptions. The Dutch-German interview was transcribed in Dutch by a bilingual person who is a native German speaker. For the first question, which focused on the type of activities the children perform, thematic coding was used (Miles et al. 2013), because this directed content analysis was appropriate given the previous literature about the topic (Hsieh and Shannon 2005). Predetermined codes based on previous research (Lindenschot et al. 2018) were: activities related to self-care, house chores, therapy, school, computing, hobbies,

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