Gersten Jonker

70   Chapter 4 Participants Every 6 weeks, 2 to 6 final-year medical students enroll in the acute care themed final- year program on a rotational basis and start with the simulation pretest of acute care competence. During the study period, we approached all students who had taken the simulation pretest to participate in the interview study. Immediately after students had completed the simulations and were leaving the simulation center, a member of our team asked each of them to participate in our study. We invited the students after the simulation to avoid potential influence of study goal awareness on their lived experiences. Students received oral and written information and gave written informed consent. The Ethical Review Board of the Netherlands Association for Medical Education approved the study in May 2016 (NERB file 712). Data collection We gathered first person accounts of lived experiences with the simulation pretest by single in-depth, face-to-face private interviews. Interviews were conducted in Dutch, andmembers of the research team translated into English the representative quotations from those interviews that appear in this research report. We devised an interview guide with open-ended questions, following guidelines by Moustakas [22]. The interviewer asked the participant, after a prompt, to focus attention on the experience and to become aware of feelings and thoughts, to describe his or her lived experience thoroughly. The interviewer asked clarifying, probing questions to obtain thick descriptions. Next, the interviewer asked open-ended questions that followed the chronology of the simulation pretest experience. The interviewer evoked reflections on felt space and time, bodily sensations, and the relation to others and self to gain thick descriptions [22]. Next, the interviewer elicited factors that the participant perceived to affect the experience. All authors approved the interview guide (Appendix 2) before we piloted it on one student. Interviewing took place between September 2016 and May 2017, within 2 weeks after the participants’ simulation experience. Concurrent analysis of interviews enriched questioning in subsequent iterations of data collection, and this process continued until we achieved theoretical sufficiency, i.e. until we could categorize new data without the need for additional themes. Our participation rate was 100%: The first 11 students we invited to participate all accepted. There were 4 male and 7 female participants with an interview duration of approximately 30 minutes.