it was given a code of ‘not self-harm’. All cases that had received discrepant codes were examined and a consensus reached for each. Initial inter-rater agreement was 88% for ‘what they did’ and 72% for ‘why they did it’, but consensus was easily reached once the final coding frame was agreed. The coding frames and discrepant cases were then discussed with JE and GL, and a final coding frame and codes for each case agreed. All categories that emerged in our study had equivalents in Hawton et al’s study [15]; there were no discrepancies. In total nine out of 147 free text responses concerning method/reason for self-harm were excluded from the self-harm group following this process (this included six responses that referred to not eating).
