Klaske van Sluis

Life after total laryngectomy 133 sampling strategy was used to include a diverse group of women in terms of, for instance, relationship status, number of years since total laryngectomy, eth- nicity. Another consideration was to include participants who had acted as a patient visitor. Eight candidates were approached for the study. They were pro- vided with the participant information form, and contacted one week later to determine intent to participate. All agreed to participate. The number of par- ticipants was determined by saturation of the data. Participants were between 60 and 77 years old and were operated 1 to 31 years ago. Two participants had undergone total laryngectomy as a primary treatment, three a salvage proce- dure, and three due to a dysfunctional larynx after previous treatment. All used a voice prosthesis to communicate. Seven participants were able to speak in flu- ent sentences, one participant was limited in her verbal communication and had a poor intelligibility. One participant needed nutritional support, and one was limited in her verbal communication and also partly tube feeding dependent. At time of the interview, six respondents had a partner, one was single, and one was a widow (see Table 8.1 for participants’ characteristics). The interviews took place between December 2017 and March 2018, were conducted at respondents’ private homes and lasted around 90 minutes. Before the start of the interview participants signed informed consent forms. In four cases the partner was also present during the interview. The interviews were mostly conducted by two interviewers ((alternating KS, AK and GY). KS, MSc, works as a speech therapist and PhD-student and has a background in health sciences. AK, MSc, works as a speech therapist and junior researcher and has a background in health sciences. KS and AK were already familiar with some of the participants due to their clinical work as speech therapists. MB, MD, PhD, is a head and neck surgeon. LM, PhD, works as a postdoctoral fellow and speech therapist. GY, PhD, works as a postdoctoral fellow and has a background in medical humanities and qualitative methods in healthcare research. The interviews were conducted using an interview guide, a so-called semi- structured approach (see appendix 1). The guide was developed by deriving topics from the existing qualitative literature [12, 13, 15] and reviewed by an expert panel of healthcare professionals. A Roland Edirol digital recorder and Logitech HD Webcam C510 was used to obtain audio and video recordings of the interviews. Video recordings were used to support intelligibility in case of poor voice outcomes. All interviews were transcribed verbatim. After each interview, participants were asked whether they would be willing to answer follow-up questions via email. All eight participants agreed, three were subse- quently approached. Two of them gave a written response.