This study was designed in compliance with the British Psychological Society’s (2021) Code of Human Research Ethics. To ensure fully informed consent, all participants were sent an information sheet in advance of data collection that summarised the procedure, the topics under investigation and their right to withdraw (Appendix B.1). All participants completed an informed consent form (Appendix B.3) to confirm that they had read and understood the information, and the key points were summarised at the beginning of the interview to remind participants of the structure and their rights (Taherdoost, 2022). After the interview, all participants were sent a debrief (Appendix B.4) which shared the full research questions and intended contributions to theory and practice (McMahon & Winch, 2018). The raw interview data were anonymised immediately after the interview and stored in a password-protected file for confidentiality.
All participants consented to the anonymised transcripts being potentially shared with other researchers through the Birkbeck data repository.