Document is current

Article History

Received: 8 October 2024

Accepted: 28 November 2025

First Online: 12 December 2025

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards and in line with the local regulations. The national and local regulations for this type of study do not require soliciting an institutional review board. At the local level (Faculty of Psychology), the “Regulations of the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Psychology at the FernUniversität in Hagen” ( ) state that researchers are responsible to sensitively plan and conduct research with human participants. If researchers choose to solicit advice from the local institutional review board, this should be done before conducting the study. Yet, there is no obligation to obtain such advice from the review board prior to running a study. Researchers can run a study with or without submitting beforehand to the local ethics review board. In either case, they are responsible for sensitively planning and conducting research with human participants. Also, at the university level, the “Regulations on the Ethical Conduct of Research involving Human Subjects” ( ) specify that researchers are to sensitively plan and conduct research with human participants and how colleagues and participants could deal with potential misconduct. Again, there is no obligation to submit the study before running it. Given that the study presented here had been conducted within research-oriented teaching and had to strictly follow the teaching-related deadlines that were incompatible with the reviewing times of the institutional review board, obtaining feedback from the institutional review board before running the study within the semester would not have been possible (and was not required—see above). Yet, to take advantage of the advice to further improve the procedure and with the perspective of running follow-up studies, the study protocol was submitted after data collection had taken place (for a potential future study that would follow up on the current one). As a result, for the procedure of the current study, a positive voting was obtained from the institutional review board of the Faculty of Psychology (IRB Name: Ethikkommission der Fakultät für Psychologie der FernUniversität in Hagen, Approval Number: EA_811_2024, March 25th, 2024, scope of approval: treatment of research participants and data and usage for the research aims in form of publication). All research was performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

: All participants (adults) provided written informed consent before participating in the study. Participants were provided with written information prior to the start of the study, outlining the voluntary nature of participation, data protection, and the study’s objectives. All participants have been fully informed that their anonymity is assured, why the research is being conducted, how their data will be utilized, and that there are no specific risks to them of participating. Participants provided informed consent individually, directly before participating in the study. Data collection took place between March 18, 2019, and April 15, 2019. Informed consent was obtained at the beginning of the survey. The scope of the consent involved participation, data use, and publication of the results. The study did not recruit individuals who are vulnerable.