These clinical parameters were based on dimensions outlined by Stone and Werner,26 who identified that treatment of people who are overweight varied from those of normal weight in three areas: instrumental avoidance (eg, shorter sessions), professional avoidance (eg, less energy/effort) or interpersonal avoidance (eg, negative tone,

evasive verbal and body language). Qualified Romidepsin cost Australian physiotherapists were recruited via the Australian Physiotherapy Association eBulletins and twitter posts, and through the primary author’s professional networks. A number of measures were employed to ensure a good response rate: snowballing was encouraged, an incentive prize was offered for participation and the survey was kept as brief as possible. The exclusion criteria were: not being a qualified physiotherapist, not identifying as Australian and prior knowledge of the research topic. A priori calculations estimated that 180 participants were required for sufficient selleck products power for the case study comparisons. Power was set at 95%. Descriptive statistics were calculated for the Anti-Fat Attitudes questionnaire and its subscales. For the

case studies, after assessing assumptions of normality, comparisons were made using independent sample t-tests to determine the effect of the independent variable (normal or overweight/obese BMI) on parametric dependent variables. Mann-Whitney and chi-squared tests were used for comparisons where data were not normally distributed. Demographic data were used to control for confounding factors such as years of experience or area of clinical Levetiracetam expertise. Analysis of the free-text responses used a theoretical thematic and count approach. 35 After all of the data were analysed using manual coding, responses that had comments relevant to the research topic were selected

as a subset (these were all responses to case studies of patients who were overweight). Three of the authors, including two psychologists (BW, LJ) and one physiotherapist (JS), identified common themes relevant to the research topic in this subset. These themes were subsequently explored in the context of current literature on weight stigma. A random sample was not taken for this study, but the demographic data presented in Table 1 show that the participants represented a broad range of physiotherapists similar to national statistics.36 and 37 The sample was similar to national statistics in age, gender and area of specialty distribution, but had slightly more rural participants, more years of experience and some differences in employment sector distribution.