Original Paper The Attitudes of Therapists and Physicians on the Use of Sex

Sampling and Recruitment
For the quantitative survey, sex therapists and physicians were
recruited through 4 professional associations: Institute for Sexual
Therapy; German Society for Sexual Medicine, Sexual Therapy,
and Sexual Science; Swiss Society of Sexology; and Austrian
Society for Sexual Sciences. Cover letters were used to inform
sex therapists and physicians about the survey, the
implementation, the purpose of our investigation, and the
exploitation of the results.
The theoretical sampling for the qualitative study was
determined by the first results obtained from the quantitative
data, which showed that sex therapists and physicians differ in
their attitudes toward sex robots in gender, age, and education.
Participants were sampled through Google searches. To obtain
a broad spectrum of opinions in the interviews, female and male
therapists with different ages and professional backgrounds
were searched for. The information regarding age and education
was found on the therapists’ homepage.
J Med Internet Res 2019 | vol. 21 | iss. 8 | e13853 | p. 4
https://www.jmir.org/2019/8/e13853/
(page number not for citation purposes)
Eichenberg et al
JOURNAL OF MEDICAL INTERNET RESEARCH
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Data Collection
The data for our online survey was collected using the Unipark
software, which complies with all data protection regulations.
The data collection took 4 weeks. A total of 480 therapists and
physicians were contacted by email, which embedded a link to
the online questionnaire. Of these, we received a total of 72
complete survey responses (response rate 15%). For the
interviews, a total of 50 female and male therapists with medical,
psychological, or social educational backgrounds of different
ages were contacted by email. In total, 5 interviews were
conducted by telephone and were digitally recorded. These
ranged from 17 to 49 min, depending on the schedule of the