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What are the risks and benefits?
Your participation in this study helps to develop better support options for people with vaginismus, dyspareunia, or sexual pain-penetration disorders. You can help to review a new questionnaire designed to assess pain and difficulties during sex. This contributes significantly to improving care for affected individuals.
You might feel uncomfortable while answering personal questions. You are free to decide how much you want to share. You may also experience fatigue from participating or face technical difficulties that could cause frustration. The study team is available at any time to support you.

What data will be collected?
In this study, we will collect the following information needed for analysis: age, gender, birth anatomy, relationship status, children, place of residence, nationality, religiosity, ethnicity, migration status, highest educational attainment, main occupation, previous experience with psychotherapy in general and sexual disorders specifically, sexual activity, sexual difficulties, contraception, menstrual cycle, pregnancy, psychological and general health status, weight, height, relationship aspects, significant burdens in love life, experiences of abuse, substance use, financial situation, stress experience, current life situation, your individual experience of symptoms, as well as questions related to sexual pain-penetration disorders.

How will the data be processed and stored?
The collection and processing of your data are conducted pseudonymously by the eHealth unit in Clinical Psychology at the University of Marburg. For this purpose, your data will be assigned a personal study number and stored without your name, so that your information can only be linked to you via the coding list. A digital coding list connects your data with the study number. This coding list is accessible only to the study team and is stored separately from the other data on the unit’s server in a restricted, password-protected folder, encrypted according to current security standards (AES-256). The coding list will be destroyed after the completion of data analysis.

The online survey is conducted via the secure platform SoSci Survey, with servers located in Germany. The project is carried out in collaboration with Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (Yannik Terhorst, Department of Psychological Methods and Diagnostics, Yannik.terhorst@psy.lmu.de) and Queen’s University Canada (Prof. Dr. Caroline Pukall, Department of Psychology, pukallc@queensu.ca). These partners have access only to pseudonymized data and cannot identify individual participants.

Will the data be kept confidential?
All collected data and personal communications are treated confidentially. Study results will be published anonymously so that your data cannot be linked to you personally. The study staff are bound by strict confidentiality. Violations may be prosecuted.

How long will the anonymized data be stored?
The anonymized data will be kept for at least 10 years after data analysis. Fully anonymized data will be made publicly available via the Open Science Framework internet database to ensure good scientific practice. This allows other researchers to verify the analysis or conduct alternative analyses.

Is participation voluntary and can I withdraw my consent?
Your participation is voluntary. You may end your participation at any time by letter or email without giving reasons and revoke your consent to data storage and processing without disadvantage. Once the codewords are deleted, we cannot identify your dataset anymore. Therefore, we can only delete your data as long as the codewords exist.

Will there be individual feedback?
There will be no medical or clinical psychological evaluation of your data.