We conducted qualitative interviews with nine of the 10 focus group moderators in the INFOPAT program (one moderator moved to a different department shortly after the completion of data collection and was not available for interview). The interviewees were aged between 30 and 54 years (M age = 36 years; SD = 8.3 years). Their professions were health scientist, pharmacist, general practitioner, or medical ethicist. Their professional experience ranged from one to 23 years (M = 7.1 years, SD = 7.7 years), and they had little or no previous experience of organizing and conducting focus groups. The moderators were interviewed in groups of one to three persons according to their project assignment (cf. Table 1).
The interviews lasted approximately 1 hour, and the interview questions were guided by the chronological order in which a focus group is organized and conducted (recruitment, preparation, moderation, methods) and by the utilization and usefulness of the results. We tape recorded the interviews, transcribed them verbatim, and performed qualitative content analysis on the transcripts (Elo & Kyngäs, 2008 (link); Mayring, 2015 ) with the help of the program MAXQDA 10.0.
The final system of categories2 (Tausch & Menold, 2015 ) consisted of two types of codes: All relevant text passages were coded with respect to the content of the statement. In addition, a second type of code was required if the statement related to a specific group of participants (e.g., patients, hospital doctors, men, women).