Table I.

Stages in the explorative–reflective thematic analysis.

Research principles	Description of the research process
1. Noting initial impressions:	The interviewers wrote down their immediate impressions after their dialogs with the participants. They discussed these observations to establish a basic sense of the participants’ experiences, and to promote reflexive awareness of interpersonal processes in the interview situation.
2. Familiarization with the data:	All researchers read the transcribed material to obtain a basic sense of the experiences described by the participants.
3. Searching for patterns of meaning:	Examining those parts of the text relevant to the research questions, the first and second author identified separable content units that represented different aspects of the participants’ experiences. We would here look at how the university students described their experiences of taking the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program in relation to mastering academic evaluation anxiety and other challenges in their everyday life.
4. Coding themes:	The first and second author developed “meaning codes” for those units, which are concepts or keywords attached to a text segment in order to permit its later retrieval. The first author then edited the text in accordance with those codes into coded groups of text with the technical assistance of Nvivo 10 software. For example, the participants’ descriptions of being friendlier with themselves or tolerating their anxiety were given the code “Acceptance.”
5. Reviewing and summarizing themes:	The first and second author interpreted and summarized the meaning within each of the coded groups of text fragments into conceptions and overall descriptions of meaning patterns and themes reflecting what, according to their understanding, emerged as the most important aspects of the participants’ experiences.
6. Team-based revision of themes:	All four authors turned back to the overall text to check whether voices and points of view needed to be added, or whether the conceptions and descriptions of themes could be developed further.
7. Critical auditing:	The third author, who was not a part of the team of teachers in the MBSR groups, had a leading role in critically auditing the identification of meaning patterns (themes).
8. Forming a consensus on themes:	The themes were finally formulated, revised and agreed upon by all four authors.