The interview questions were simple, unstructured, and open-ended and went on for approximately hour per participant I directed the interview questions toward the sadhus’ lives, experiences, and beliefs while setting aside or suspending my opinions and prior knowledge of happiness I exercised active listening and worked hard not to interrupt the sadhus during the interviews until they finished answering the current question I asked the participants the same starting question with little adaptations for each participant, keeping flexibility (Maxwell, 2013; Patton, 2014), which added trustworthiness to this investigation (Ravitch & Carl, 2015) In conclusion, I tested and refined the interview protocol as outlined in Appendix A with the help of two close friends and my dissertation study partner The interview questions were semi-structured and open-ended The interviews elicited life stories, descriptions, and concepts of human happiness from the sadhus As per the interview protocol, I asked the same questions to all 20 sadhus with little variations Interview transcriptions After the interviews, I transcribed all 20 conversations in their original language, with the sadhus, which was a complex and time-consuming task Because I recorded the interviews and transcribed them, it added to the factual accuracy of the data, increasing the descriptive validity of this study (Maxwell, 1992; Ravitch & Carl, 2015) Transcribing interviews also preserved the confidentiality of the participants because I did not hand over the interview data to any third-party firm During the transcription phase, I had to listen to the recordings multiple times, which helped me learn and understand the research data (Ravitch & Carl, 2015), which proved invaluable during the data analysis phase 83