reasons for encouraging participation in the scheme; (2) meth-
ods
for
recruitment
of
participants;
and
(3)
perceptions
about
any
social, economic or cultural biases in their volunteer base. The final
theme (motivations and barriers) focused on: (1) procedures for
dealing with the results; (2) perceptions around the motivations
of participants; and, (3) perceptions concerning any bias in their
volunteer base. Interviewees were encouraged to elaborate within
and
beyond
the
themes
wherever
possible.
The
telephone
inter-
views were conducted by the same researcher (Sarah Hobbs) to
minimise error due to interviewer variability (Bryman, 2008).
Prior
to
commencing
the
interview,
a
consent
form
was
pro-
vided to participants in order to explain the aims of the study and
to
seek
consent
for
using
participants’
viewpoints
as
part
of
the
piece
of
research.
At
the
beginning
of
each
interview,
the
outline
of the study was again explained, and verbal consent sought to
record the interview. Interviews were recorded using a digital voice
recorder and transcribed after the event. We coded the transcripts
from each interview according to the three major themes (objec-
tives for running the scheme, types of participant and motivations
and
barriers)
using
Atlas-Ti
® (ATLAS Ti Scientific Software Devel-
opment
GmbH).
Atlas
Ti
was
chosen
for
exploring
interview
data
because of its suitability for working with small sample sizes (Barry,
1989). Computer-aided qualitative data software such as Atlas Ti is
also a useful analytical aid because of the flexibility to visually map
out themes in the data, reflect on emerging themes and code key
concepts, generating theory that is grounded within the data (Barry,
1989; Basit, 2003). Using a grounded theory approach within the
constraints
of
the
three
major
themes,
we
identified
additional
sub-
themes
emerging
from
the
transcriptions
of
the
interviews.