Sources and symptoms of stress among nurses in the first Chinese anti-Ebola medical team during the Sierra Leone aid mission: A qualitative study

Liu, Chunzi; Wang, Huaming; Zhou, Lin; Xie, Hui; Yang, Huiyin; Yu, Yanbo; Sha, Huayan; Yang, Ying; Zhang, Xin

Within 24 h, the recorded interviews were transcribed wordper-word and sentence-by-sentence, then compared with notes. Two investigators worked together on the coding process. The first author and another investigator independently reviewed the transcriptions to conduct open coding and compared them to agree on the codes. The recorded materials were then converted into text documents. As personal relationships and trust were built with the nurses, Janice's strategy [19] was used to ensure confidence and trustworthiness, as it does not apply measuring tools. Colaizzi's seven-step method was used in the data analysis, which involved carefully reviewing materials, extracting and summarizing major statements from the specific and scattered data, describing significant statements, and encoding recurring statements. Colaizzi's qualitative method is a rigorous and robust descriptive phenomenological approach, and therefore ensures the credibility and reliability of its results [20] . The coded statements were then integrated to generate detailed and complete descriptions. Similar statements were identified to establish the fundamental structure of the observations. Finally, the nurses reviewed and confirmed the documented interviews to ensure their authenticity.