**6.5 Reflexive and polytextual thematic analysis: an inductive approach**

A data-driven inductive approach to Reflexive and Polytextual TA conducted within the Reflective Lifeworld Approach framework [13], was adopted for the composite data. There was no pre-determined coding frame and as advocated for psychotherapy research [70], the author considered themes to be active creations uniting data and capturing implicit meaning beneath the data surface. Each composite text was read repeatedly for familiarisation with the complexity and scope of the data and analysed using Reflexive TA. Polytextual TA was used to analyse the eco-map composites [17]. Interesting features focused on the protective effects of friendships were assigned initial codes which were combined into potential themes according to similarity and prevalence and then re-checked against the data. 32 categories relating to the protective effects of friendships across both data sets were identified and grouped into the following four themes.

