Themes

Themes

With our site visits completed and data collected, we then organized what we gathered. Initially, we didn’t have much foresight of what to do with all our information. Nonetheless, with our AA's help, manage to figure it out!

We developed themes and group them into 3 categories; trainees’, parents’, and supervisors’ themes. The themes were curated from our analysis of the selected trainees (those we selected in phase 2) and from all the interviews. For the trainees, we aimed to identify standout themes/skills of the trainee that can influence their ability to function effectively in life and/or work environment. It was a two part analysis whereby step 1 was to identify the themes of each particular trainee, and step 2 was to group similar themes across all the selected trainees.

After identifying similar themes, we proceeded to rate our selected trainees on each theme. Then, we also grouped the themes into 2 categories, “Easy to train” and “Hard to train” (using our own reasoning and research). We noticed that the trainees tend to score low on the themes/skills which are hard to train. Hence, out of the 9 themes, we decided to work on only 5 of them, the ones with the lowest rating scores.

As seen below, these were our results, whereby the 5 themes were highlighted:

*Note: 1: Not at all; 5: Very high degree

A similar process was used for the parents’ and supervisors’ themes. After interviewing them about their child and obtaining unique themes about them, we proceeded to group similar themes observed across all parents. We added “Internal'' and “External” categories to show whether internal factors (individual skills) or external factors affect the trainees’ employability.

*Note: 1: Least important factor; 5: Most important factor

As for supervisors, who are also parents of trainees, they provided general feedback about all trainees and also about their own children in PERKOBP. Thus, there is some overlap for the parents’ and supervisors’ themes, as seen below. 

*Note: 1: Least important factor; 5: Most important factor

For both parents and supervisors, we decided to work on the 3 highlighted themes because they overlapped and have the highest rating (these are the most important factors affecting trainees' employability). At this point, we figured out our themes and were ready to search for research articles to support our themes and develop interventions to address those themes.