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44 = USING INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS pants’ accounts, little is known about the subjective interpretation of SC use by the people themselves who used SCs. The aim of this study was to examine personal interpretations of experiences derived from the use of SCs. Meshack et al. (2013) suggests that qualitative research offers an excellent opportunity to uncover subjective aspects of personal motives and social norms in connection with drug consumption. Therefore, the aim of our study was to assess the experiences of SC use and analyze subjective interpretation of experiences of people who had problematic SC use, by means of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), a qualitative research tool that works with a person-centered approach (Smith et al., 2009). 3.2. METHODS Participants The current study was conducted in two Hungarian drug rehabilitation centers that work with a recovery approach and require abstinence. The participants attended the treatment voluntarily. Based on the methodology of IPA, a purposive sample was recruited (Smith et al., 2009) among the treatment participants. According to the methodology of IPA, the idiographic inquiry (Smith et al., 2009) requires a homogenous and small sample. According to Smith et al. (2009), the recommended sample size for an IPA study is three to six interviewees. Therefore, the current study involved six male patients (aged 20- 27 years) who were self-identified SC users. No female users were available. Before the analysis, they had been using SCs for at least 2-6 years, and at the time of the study they had been abstinent for at least 1 month. It was assumed that SCs were the dominant components of the substance that they smoked. The study focused on a particular subgroup of the SC user population: people who had problematic SC use and entered treatment. Due to their abstinence, the effects of the drug did not influence participants’ responses, and they could describe their experiences also from an outsider’s perspective. Additionally, by using IPA, the researcher could examine processes: how experiences could change over time (Smith et al., 2009) and over the addiction process, as many previous IPA studies explored experiences of people who used drugs in recovery (Hill & Leeming, 2014; Larkin & Griffiths, 2002; Shinebourne & Smith, 2009). The participation in this study was voluntary, and we use pseudonyms for the participants to protect their identity. Information about their sociodemographic characteristics are presented in Table 1. The Institutional Review Board at Eötvös Loránd University approved all study protocols.
