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Article History

Received: 16 November 2024

Accepted: 10 June 2025

First Online: 1 July 2025

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The study was approved by the Scientific Council of University Research and Creation of our university (Ethical Approval No. 33285 from 23 May 2024).

: The authors of this article confirm that all research was performed in accordance with relevant guidelines/regulations. Research involving human research participants has been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. All participants have been fully informed that their anonymity and confidentiality are assured, why the research is being conducted, how their data will be utilised, and that there is no risk to them of participating. At the beginning of each questionnaire, participants gave their full written consent to participate in the study. At the beginning of each interview and focus group, participants gave their full oral consent to participate in the study. This was considered sufficient by both participants and authors, as the authors did not store any personal information about the participants (such as names, addresses, telephone numbers, or email addresses). An informed consent statement was obtained in our non-interventional research for conducting surveys through online questionnaires and in-person individual and focus group interviews. All participants were fully informed about the purpose of the study, why they were being asked to participate, what participation involves for the participants, the fact that the participation is voluntary, and about the participants’ personal privacy. In this regard, following the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Parliament and of the European Union Council of 27 April 2016, the participants were informed about their rights to access the personal data that is being processed, to request that their personal data to be deleted, to request that incorrect personal data about them to be rectified, to receive a copy of their personal data (data portability), and to send a compliant to the Romanian Data Protection Authority regarding the processing of their personal data. Further, the participants were informed about how their personal data will be used only anonymised, for statistical processing and scientific research purposes, stored for up to 3 months to transcribe the audio recorded interviews and to organise the database resulting from questionnaires. The informed consent for the survey, focus groups and interviews was signed by the participants in the period 5 December 2022 to 20 January 2023. The entire research was ethically approved by the Scientific Council of University Research and Creation of the West University of Timisoara (No. 33285/23.05.2024) and certifies the fulfilment of the norms of observance of the principles and procedures regarding good conduct in scientific research. The ethical approval is necessary and sufficient because at our university, the regulations on research ethics do not require that the application for ethical approval be submitted prior to data collection. Instead, the research must be ethical in its entirety (including survey/interview/focus group design, data collection, data analysis, interpretation, and manuscript). Therefore, the Scientific Council of our university is responsible for ensuring that the paper’s ethics are maintained from the initial stage of field study through to the final written draft of the article. We can confirm that we have fully complied with the ethics principle that is in place at our university. This is specified in our University’s Ethics Guidelines, available online at this link: , in Romanian. This guide is in accordance with the Romanian Higher Education Law, which can be found here: . As such, we have also fully complied with the ethics of the Romanian Higher Education Law.