Asia Pacific Family Medicine 2009, 8:9 http://www.apfmj.com/content/8/1/9 Fir st step: Pilot int er views Second step: Following semi-str uctur ed inter views Carrying out five interviews Consolidating the content of interview guides and the length of interviews Planning for approximately twenty interviews to attain theoretical saturation, where no new themes emerge Several further interviews undertaken to confirm whether saturation occurred Comp letion of inter views Throughout these steps, researchers collected and analyzed the data concurrently. (= Constant comparison [18]) IFnitgeurvrieew1 Process Interview Process. We planned to use two steps: pilot interviews (the first step) and following semi-structured interviews (the second step). knowledge do you wish to acquire the most? 5. Do you reason- ably expect to be able to attain your medical goal at this stage? Please explain why or why not. (3) Career choice in medi- cine: 6. What career decision-making plans do you have? 7. What factors affect your choice of specialty? (4) Impact of training on individual medical students' professional rela- tionships: 8. What motivated/demotivated you to practice in your bedside learning? Could you provide some actual exam- ples? 9. What difficulties did you experience in your training? Could you describe what happened? 10. What did you like/dis- like about your contact with your mentors, paramedical staff, and colleagues? Could you give examples? (5) At the end of the interview: 11. Finally, do you have any issues you want to add concerning clinical training? Is there anything else you think is important for your clinical training? All interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed, and all verbatim scripts were preserved for anyone to be able to replicate the findings in a similar environment and have a clear understanding of how the authors arrived at their conclusions. Interviews were carried out until no new themes emerged. Each medical student signed a written form of informed consent. The scripts were read in their entirety and analysed sepa- rately as follows: Firstly, scripts were split into meaningful words, phrases or sentences and shortened while preserv- ing the core quality of the scripts. We refer to these parts as "units". Secondly, these units were aggregated with sim- ilar groups of content and labeled "codes". Thirdly, using these codes, we created "categories" which were groups of content that share a commonality and are mutually exclu- sive and exhaustive. Finally "themes", which linked the latent meanings together in these categories, emerged. The research interviews and analysis were conducted con- currently; that was called constant comparison [18], and preliminary results pertaining to these themes were pre- sented to the third author (MMa), unfamiliar with the research processes, to validate and revise the findings. All three authors contributed to discussion, revised the results, and came to a final agreement. All study process was implemented utilizing Japanese Microsoft Excel 2003 and later the results were translated into English. To ensure that the results are both cogent and reasonable, all interviews were painstakingly trans- lated back into Japanese. Back translation both improves the reliability and validity of the research by requiring that the quality of the translation is verified by an independent translator, translating back into the original language [19]. Page 3 of 7 (page number not for citation purposes)