Thank you for taking part in the Birth Registration Law: Exploring Challenges, Exclusions and Reform project by telling us your birth registration story.

At this stage of this project, we are gathering information about the difficulties and challenges people have experienced with birth registration in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, especially those relating to exclusion. The research does not define exclusion in a particular way. Instead, participants are invited to recount their stories and experiences of birth registration in their life, to better understand where the system may be falling short and what legal reforms might be necessary.

To be eligible to participate, you need to:

• Read the Participant Information sheet;
• Be aged 18 or older;
• Have a story that relates to the birth registration system in England, Wales or Northern Ireland.

Before proceeding, please read the Participant Information sheet. This explains why the research is being done, what participation will mean for you, what will happen to the information that you provide and how it will be stored. A reminder that any identifying information provided will be anonymised by the researcher, and that any outputs from the research will not identify individual participants.

If you have any questions before continuing, please contact the researcher, Dr Julie McCandless, at the project email address: birthregistrationlaw@kent.ac.uk. Julie will be happy to answer any questions, or discuss any concerns you might have.

You can stop participating at any time by closing the browser. To send the researcher your information, you need to click the submit button at the end.

You can save your text and return to it later. You will need an email address to be able to use this function and you may receive a reminder about completing your story.

Before proceeding, please provide your name, or, if you do not want to provide your name, a contact code of at least six characters (which could be a made up name). A name or contact code is necessary to ensure that the researcher can identify your story after submission, should you wish to withdraw from the research in the post-submission six week period (see further Project Information sheet).

If you provide a contact code, please keep a note of it.

Thank you for your interest in this research project. If you are happy with the statements below, please confirm your consent to participate by recording your agreement with each statement in the box provided.

If not, but you are still keen to participate, please feel free to contact the researcher, Dr Julie McCandless, at the project email address: birthregistrationlaw@kent.ac.uk.

In this section, you will be asked to provide some non-identifying information. This information helps the researcher contextualise the data.

This is the section where you provide the details of your birth registration story. The purpose of the research is to explore the difficulties and challenges that people may have experienced with the birth registration system in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, especially those relating to exclusion.

You can write about your experience of registering another person (e.g. a child), your own birth registration experience, or the experience of a person known to you (e.g. a family member or friend). Experiences may include re-registration of a birth, or efforts to re-register a birth.

You can write as much or as little as you like, but the more information you are willing to provide, the better the research results. You should include information about anything that you feel is important. This is your story.

There are no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or stories. Rather, the purpose of the research is to better understand participants’ experiences.

All the questions in this section are optional and are intended to help you structure your story. Please do not worry if you feel that a question is not relevant to you or if you have already included relevant information in a previous answer and want to skip a question.

You can save your text and return to it later. You will need an email address to be able to use the return later function and you may receive a reminder about completing your story.

You may prefer to write your story in a word document or other text-based format (e.g. on the notes function on a smartphone), and then copy-paste your answers into the text boxes below. Please feel free to do so. Alternatively, you can upload your document instead. A word document template with the questions below is provided here.

This is the final question!

The next stage of the research will be to conduct interviews with participants about their birth registration stories. The purpose of the interviews will be to further the researcher’s understanding of the written stories to help with the research analysis. Any interview would be on a confidential basis and take around 60-90 minutes of your time. The researcher would arrange a mutually convenient time and place (which may be virtual) and provide you with the necessary Participant Information in advance.

As with this part of the research, participation in the interview stage is entirely voluntary and you will be asked to complete a further consent form to confirm that you are happy to take part.

If you provide contact details now for a potential interview, but later change your mind about doing an interview, you can withdraw your contact details from the recontact list by emailing the researcher to let her know. You do not have to provide a reason for changing your mind.

You have reached the end of the questions.

Thank you for taking the time to tell your story. It is hugely appreciated and will really help with the research.

When you are ready, please click the SUBMIT button below. This will send your information to the researcher. A reminder that once you submit your information, you have up to six weeks to change your mind about participating. If you wish to withdraw from the research within the next six weeks, please contact the researcher Dr Julie McCandless, on the project email address, birthregistrationlaw@kent.ac.uk, and include the name or contact code that you provided earlier.

After six weeks, your information will be anonymised and collated with other data for analysis, and it will not be possible to withdraw it from the research.

Thank you!