Application of three different coaching strategies for people with emotional eating 81 4 We asked the participants’ opinion on the described scenarios and the feedback given by the coach (for the provided feedback, see Table 6 of Appendix). Recruitment procedures A pilot study was conducted among six participants (students) to validate the study protocol. To recruit participants, an information letter with an invitation to participate was sent out to all dieticians, who forwarded this invitation for voluntary participation to their clients. A hyperlink in the email directed applicants to an online survey. Initially, candidates were presented with information on the study, followed by an online letter of consent they had to agree with before proceeding to the first vignette. Candidates who did not give informed consent were excluded from the study. Due to the voluntary character of participation there were no consequences attached to the dietitian’s treatment. The dietitians didn’t know which of their clients participated in this vignette study. Out of a total of 119 participants, 76 completed the entire study. It is not known why some participants did not complete the questionnaires. The participants, all female, had emotional eating, a BMI in adequate or high range, and were aged > 18 years. Participant features The majority of participants were aged 40 to 60 years. Table 2 presents information on the participants’ characteristics: 44% were obese with a BMI of 30-40, 35% were overweight with a BMI of 25-30, and 21% had an adequate BMI. Participants scored high on the DEBQ emotional eating scale, according to the norm tables for women aged 41-70 [6]. Data analysis All answers were sorted by the conditions “when experiencing cravings” and “after emotional eating”, and separately analyzed for the conditions. A thematic analysis according to Braun and Clarke [55] was conducted – a method combining top-down and bottom-up to find themes on a semantic level that can relate to the research questions by coding the raw data. The data was compared and collected in themes. Selective coding was conducted to gain deeper understanding of the themes and their interdependencies [56]. A reliable categorization was obtained by consensus-finding: the main coding was conducted by the first author. A colleague who is an independent scholar (N. de Jonge) was sent the coding table as well as the explanation of the codes and the corresponding examples, and coded a selection of 10%of the original data. We found a 100% agreement of codes with the first coder.
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