Luppo Kuillman

The predictive values of a Deliberative and a Paternalistic Attitude 113 5 METHOD Study design, participants, and data collection  In this cross-sectional study, five physician assistant (PA) degree programs and one nurse practitioner (NP) degree program were selected as sources for approaching alumni. As per the European General Data Protection Regulation, the researchers were not granted permission to use the databases of the programs in order to retrieve the email addresses of alumni. For this reason, we sent letters explaining the study to the program administrators, who mailed them to their respective PA and NP alumni. The letter contained a hyperlink to a private web-based system (name). If willing to participate in the survey, the alumni were asked to activate the hyperlink and provide their email contact details. Of the 896 alumni (470 NPs and 426 PAs) the program administrators sent letters to, 294 (176 PAs and 118 NPs) provided their email addresses. We sent an access key to the web-based study questionnaires to these alumni who provided their email addresses. At the end of the online survey period (January–March 2015), 155 respondents had completed all of the questionnaires (response rate of 52.7% ). We were unable to test for selection bias, as no information was available about the alumni who did not participate. To prevent missing data, we designed all the survey questions in the forced-choice format. The dataset used in the current study was the same as the one in previous studies by Kuilman and colleagues (L. Kuilman, Jansen, Middel, Mulder, & Roodbol, 2019; L. Kuilman et al., 2020; L. Kuilman, Jansen, Mulder, & Roodbol, 2020). Variables from that pool were used in the current study but were used to address different hypotheses.   Measurements  Sociodemographic characteristics The following background characteristics were collected to conduct tests for the comparability of the NP and PA samples: gender, age, religious beliefs, and political affiliation. Respondents were also asked to characterize their working environments as (a) “hospital;” (b) “general practice;” (c) “mental healthcare;” (d) “care for people with mental disabilities;” or (e) “other.”