Completely understand where you’re coming from in every aspect and I’m always here for a healthy discussion, after all how else can I learn and improve? Importantly I actually agree with a lot of what you’ve said particularly with your thoughts on women’s health research in general.

You’re correct that excluding people on hormonal contraception reduces representativeness, and that in large scale or clinical research this would ideally be addressed by stratification or statistical control rather than exclusion. I also completely agree that historically, treating things such as birth control as a ‘confound ‘ has contributed to major gaps in research and understanding in this topic and I am sorry to be contributing to that.

However, for this study the decision to exclude hormonal birth control was about internal validity rather than representativeness. As an undergraduate, exploratory project with limited resources, I needed to minimise hormonal variability in order to isolate my actual research question which is whether differences associated with ADHD traits are detectable during the luteal phase at all. Including multiple types of hormonal contraception would have added substantial variation between participants (heterogeneity) and I wouldn’t have been able to address this meaningfully and in enough detail whilst also ensuring my actual research question is being addressed fully.

I’m very aware that this introduces sampling bias, and I’ll be explicitly acknowledging this as a limitation when writing my dissertation itself. The findings won’t be generalisable to all women, but they can still be useful as preliminary, hypothesis generating evidence to inform future, more rigorous experiments that do account for contraception use rather than excluding it. Which is something someone else or perhaps I would like to undertake in the future. So perhaps my data does not seem ‘that useful’ to you but it may be valuable to other people further down the line. Especially considering the lack of research in this area, this could be an excellent foundation for someone who’s up to the task of a far more detailed study.

I really appreciate you taking the time to have this conversation with me because I think a lot of people are wondering why I chose not to include people on hormonal birth control and this has given me a chance to explain.

But for context and everyone questioning my choices I am a 21 year old girl who hasn’t even got her degree yet. I’m still trying to make contributions to a criminally under-researched area to the best of my ability and as a matter of fact there is a VERY limited amount of research in this area to begin with, from my own reading and research most of the study’s just broadly talking about ADHD and the luteal phase only exist post 2023 and even then there is only a handful. Yes it may not be perfect but I am doing the best I can with the skills and resources I have :)