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3. ASSESSING THE EXPERIENCE OF USING SYNTHETIC CANNABINOIDS... m 45 name age | se | ott sns| Westen |Owaten esc) esp u ums | 0 | aeons "ram go | a i) ie Sele Mana OR stn] [ae |e | dense [36 Sno aa] 2 fae anime 177 Bm ie | 2 Je | seo | menos! | non “| [tae [see [tense [38 "Sei 1. Table Participants’ sociodemographic characteristics. (Participants’ names have been changed to protect their identities) Data collection For this study we conducted semi-structured interviews by using open-ended questions. The interviews lasted 45-60 min. In IPA studies, participants are perceived as experts on the subject, and therefore the interview schedule should allow ample opportunity for them to tell their stories, and should be flexible enough to go into novel areas and produce richer data (Smith & Osborn, 2007). The interview schedule contained the following questions (which were modified in the light of participants’ responses; (Smith & Osborn, 2007)) “Tell me about your experiences of SC use’, “How did you see yourself, when you used the drug?” How did others see you, when you used the drug?” “How are the experiences of SC use are different from using other drugs?” Data analysis The interviews were transcribed verbatim, and we analyzed data using IPA. During the analysis, we applied the aspects of IPA: the accounts of six participants were detailed enough to track the participants’ sense-making of their experiences. IPA works with “double hermeneutics”, where the participants try to interpret their experiences, and the researcher tries to interpret the participants’ interpretation of their experiences. During the analysis, initial notes or comments were added upon close and multiple readings of the interview transcripts. Through making initial notes and comments, the researcher captured the meaning of the experience in each participant’s accounts. During this deep and intense analytical work (double hermeneutic), which is often explained by the “hermeneutic cycle” (the researcher steps into the participants’ meaning making process and analyzes it from an interpreter’s perspective (see (Smith et al., 2009)), “emergent themes” are formed. In the second stage, patterns and themes across the “emergent themes” are identified and clustered into more abstract “master themes”
