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Article History

Received: 30 January 2025

Accepted: 8 May 2026

First Online: 28 May 2026

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: All participants participated voluntarily and gave written informed consent for their data to be used for scientific research. They could withdraw at any time and were explicitly informed of this.

: Under the Code of Ethics for Research involving Human Participants of the Faculty of Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in the version applicable at the time of data collection , researchers conducting non-WMO research with human participants are required to complete a mandatory online Self-Check before the start of the research. The Self-Check assesses the proposed research against criteria covering informed consent, participant vulnerability, risk of mental or physical harm and stress, exposure to burdensome stimuli, deception, compensation, data linkage across sources, and the guarantee of anonymity, confidentiality, and privacy. Studies that do not raise concerns on these criteria fall on the Faculty’s light review track and do not require submission for formal committee review. Studies that do are referred for comprehensive review. We completed the Self-Check for this project before the start of data collection in 2021. The Self-Check returned the result that “the research project does not require further evaluation by the Research Ethics Review Committee”, on the grounds that participants would be asked for informed consent, the research posed no risks to participants or researchers, participants were not in a vulnerable position, no unusual recruitment incentives or distressing stimuli were used, no deception was involved, and participants would remain anonymous. The completed Self-Check constitutes the institutional record of compliance for the project. The research was conducted in accordance with the Netherlands Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (2018). All students participated voluntarily and gave written informed consent for their data to be used for scientific research. They could withdraw at any time without consequence for their participation in the course or their relationship with the teaching and research team, and were explicitly informed of this. To protect confidentiality, we reported findings anonymously and avoided identifiable information such as gender, nationality, study background, or the topics of individual student projects when presenting examples and quotations from the data.