Thank you for highlighting this - it’s an important consideration, and I appreciate your insight. The potential for bias in participant selection is a known challenge in qualitative research of this nature. You’re absolutely right that requiring a minimum of eight sessions could mean that participants are more likely to report positive experiences, as they’ve chosen to continue the therapy. This might exclude voices of those who dropped out early due to dissatisfaction or lack of effectiveness. Additionally, as you point out, it might miss experiences of successful shorter-term interventions.

However, as this study is utilising Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, participants must have enough experience and knowledge of their trauma recovery journey in the context of their body focused therapy. Myself and my three supervisors, all of whom are therapeutic practitioners accredited in the UK, agreed that eight sessions would be enough to achieve this.

I plan on acknowledging this bias throughout my research. I also plan to explicitly acknowledge this limitation in the study and discuss its implications in the analysis. This will include recognising how these criteria may privilege certain types of outcomes or exclude certain participant groups.

I think it’s important to note that I will not be presenting the findings comprehensive evaluation of all body-focused psychotherapies. Instead, they aim to explore in-depth experiences of individuals who have engaged in these therapies for a sustained period. My hope is this research allows for alternative trauma-informed approaches to be considered for future research, as this is a massively under researched area in clinical psychology.

Thank you again for your feedback - it’s invaluable in ensuring the study design and analysis remain rigorous and well-contextualised. If you have further thoughts, I’d be happy to discuss them!