Chapter 6 160 Data analysis To explore the experiences of individuals with emotional eating about the online tailored exercises, the written answers to the five open questions were collected from an SPSS (version 25) file and imported into a Microsoft Office Word document, sorted per intervention group. Thematic coding [59] was used to facilitate the analysis of the answers to the open question. All meaningful fragments, consisting of either a sentence, a part of a sentence or a combination of sentences, were coded by LS into overarching themes by analyzing the underlying meaning of each fragment. An iterative process facilitated the adjustment and fine-tuning of the final fifteen coding schemes. The final coding schemes were peer-reviewed by AD. For all coding schemes, an acceptable inter-rater reliability (LS and AD; range .75 to 1.00) was reached after the first round of coding. The qualitative data about the experiences of individuals with emotional eating with the online tailored exercises was used to help interpret the found effects. To explore the effect of the three tailored exercises on positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA), measured with the I-PANAS-SF, and on emotion dysregulation, measured with the DERS-SF, summed PA and NA scores, and DERS-SF total and subscales scores at baseline (T0), mid-intervention (T1), and post-intervention (T2) were compared using a paired t-test. In case of small intervention groups and not normally distributed data, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used instead of a paired t-test. Results Participants’ baseline characteristics A total of 80 participants were enrolled in the study and completed the questionnaires at baseline. Of the 80 participants, 41 received the body scan exercise (group A), five received the opposite action exercise (group B) and 34 participants the positive reframing exercise (group C), according to the study procedure. Participants’ baseline characteristics are provided in table 3. The table presents the means and the standard deviations of the variables. The mean score on DEBQ-E is highly similar to those of the norm-group of obese women with ages between 21 and 40 years [60]. At mid-intervention, 47 of the 80 participants had dropped out. In total, 15 of the 80 participants (19.0%) completed post-intervention measurements, eight participants from group A, two participants from group B and five participants from group C. One-way ANOVA calculations showed no significant differences between the completers and the dropout groups on any socio-demographic characteristics and questionnaires at baseline.
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