memos after the interviews with the sadhus Later, I correlated the information in the memos with the interview data during the data coding and analysis phase In conclusion, I collected research data by interviewing the sadhus in line with the requirements of a phenomenological investigation The participant interviews extended for an average of hour and were open-ended Before the formal meetings with the sadhus, two pilot interviews helped refine the interview protocol and method of asking simple questions without interruption I transcribed the interviews and followed up with the sadhus to clarify abstract concepts of happiness I also wrote field notes during the interviews and later correlated them with the interview data during the data coding and analysis phase Data Coding and Analysis It took months to find and interview 20 genuine sadhus and transcribe their recorded interviews This section describes how I conducted the data coding and analysis in this research Data coding and analysis was an extensive non-linear and iterative process that required extensive reading and re-reading of the interview data I read the entire interview data set multiple times, leading to data familiarization (Ravitch & Carl, 2015), and highlighted the significant quotes in the interviews that provided an understanding of how the participants experienced happiness Phenomenologists call this highlighting of relevant expressions in the data, horizontalization (Moustakas, 1994) For data coding and analysis, I used a qualitative data analysis software application, Nvivo 12 (Nvivo, 2018), and an online mind-mapping tool, MindMup (MindMup Gold, 2018) 85