Study title

United Kingdom

Individual

An exploratory qualitative methodology was used with the aim of understanding the practices and processes through which donation is made meaningful in people’s lives. This document details the methods used in relation to interviews with donors, donors’ relatives and clinic staff. Please note that, due to the limitations of anonymization in relation to unusual cases and non-consent from some participants, some transcripts produced as part of this project have not been archived with the UKDS. In addition, a number of the transcripts and further details of the cases are available only following request, and after review by, the PI. This report provides information about the whole sample with the aim of providing some context to the archived data.Interviews with donors took place during 2018 and 2019. They usually lasted between 90 and 120 minutes (ranging from 35 to 160 minutes of audio recorded conversation) and took place either in participants’ homes, a public place (such as a café) or an office (usually at the donor’s workplace but on two occasions at the University). We took an in-depth, loosely structured approach to interviewing donors, beginning with a variation on the request, ‘tell me how you became a donor?’ Interviewers then encouraged participants to tell their ‘donation stories’ in their own words, focussing on the topics they considered most important. A topic guide was used to probe for areas of particular interest and ensure topics of interest, not spontaneously raised, were covered. Such topics included: talking to others about their donation, thoughts about the possibility of future (or ongoing) contact with recipient families, experiences of the process of donation, finding out (or not) about the outcome of the donation.Interviews with donor relatives and with clinic staff (counsellors and donor coordinators) were often shorter (averaging approximately an hour in both cases) and slightly more structured. For practical reasons, a minority of the interviews with clinic staff and donor relatives were conducted via telephone, at the request of participants.Interviews with family members began by asking how they first found out their relative was considering donating/had donated, how that had been presented to them and what their reaction had been. As well as asking relatives to recount their relative’s ‘donation story’, we also asked who they had told about the donation and their thoughts about the future. Interviews with fertility counsellors and donor coordinators focussed on their work with donors. We asked about their aims and approach in the work they (and their organisations) did with donors and tried to establish the kinds of topics that these professionals covered in their conversations with them and the reasons these were considered important. In addition, we asked questions about their impressions of donors they had worked with e.g. what kinds of people came forward to donate, what were their reasons for doing so, how did they respond to the possibility of being traced and what kinds of issues or questions did they generally raise.In total we conducted 88 interviews including 52 interviews with donors, 23 with donors’ relatives and 18 with infertility counsellors or donor coordinators. Five donors were also partners of donors, hence the numbers for each group do not total 88.Further details on our sample and recruitment are included in the supporting documents.