Luppo Kuillman

Facilitating and motivating factors for reporting reprehensible conduct 89 4 METHOD Study design, participants, and data collection In this cross-sectional study, we selected five PA degree programs and one NP degree programas sources for approaching alumni. In accordance with 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, administrators of the programs sent the information letter concerning the study to 470 NP alumni and 426 PA alumni. By activating a hyperlink to a private web-based system included in this letter, individual alumni were free to reveal their contact details to the researchers. When respondents granted permission to use their email addresses, this was regarded as informed consent. In all, 294 subjects (176 PAs and 118 NPs) expressed willingness to participate. Each of these subjects was sent the access key to the web-based set of questionnaires. At the end of the online survey period (January–March 2015), 155 respondents had completed all of the questionnaires, indicating a response rate of 52.7% (i.e., 155/294). We were unable to test for selection bias, as no information was available about the alumni who did not participate. Because all of the questions in the Qualtrics online survey environment were forced choice, there were no missing data. The dataset used in the current study was the same as the one in previous studies by Kuilman and colleagues (2019 and 2020) (Kuilman, Jansen, Middel, Mulder, & Roodbol, 2019; Kuilman, Jansen, Mulder, Middel, & Roodbol, 2020). Different variables were used from that pool, however, the current study focused on different research questions. In one previous study (Kuilman et al. 2020), the “Ethics Advocacy Scale” (EAS) and the scale for “Behavioral Control targeted at Preventing Harm” (BCPH) were used for the purpose of convergent and discriminant validation. Measurements Sociodemographic characteristics The following background characteristics were collected for purposes of conducting 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.”