The choice to make use of both quantitative and qualitative data is aimed at minimizing problems with the validity measures wherever possible. When only quantitative data is used, it’s hard to determine the extent you measure what you think you measure. Qualitative data is also applied in the form of in-depth interviews to address this problem. The collected survey data will be analyzed with the online program Qualtrics and data from the in-depth interviews will be analyzed with the computer program Atlas.ti.

To keep track of answering the main question, the steps and themes that will be performed within this thesis are defined in advance. A possible disadvantage of this is that individual perspectives of respondents and aspects of the social world will stay hidden despite the fact they could’ve been of interest to this study. One may also wonder what kind of people are willing to cooperate in the research and how these people differ from individuals who do not.

Finally, it is important to note that it is not possible to measure mutual trust for all groups of respondents because not all groups maintain personal contact with each other. A patient will in most cases maintains personal contact with his/her physician. It is less likely for patients to keep in contact with manufacturers, and it is doubtful that there is communication between patients and security experts.