123 Patients’ and volunteers’ experiences with a social network intervention 4 findings can be related to forensic outpatient populations in general, as these populations usually consist of predominantly males. The fact that we were able to include a substantial group of participants and to explore both patients’ and coaches’ perspectives are considered important strengths of this qualitative study. Although in general we found that these two perspectives corresponded, examination of both perspectives allowed us to obtain a more complete overview of experiences with the intervention. Furthermore, the inclusion of patients who failed to engage from the start of the intervention provided a better insight into the barriers to engagement. Additionally, we believe that our findings were established through a comprehensive process of data coding – detailed line-by-line coding – and analysis, with continuous review of themes. Lastly, the external validity of our results is considered high, as we interviewed patients from an RCT that included a heterogenous sample of forensic psychiatric outpatients (Swinkels et al., 2020). Therefore, we believe that the findings can be used to guide the development and implementation of informal social network interventions in forensic outpatient care. Several implications for clinical practice could be considered from our findings. Firstly, we agree there is no "one-size-fits-all" befriending approach (Cassidy et al., 2019). Patients’ receptivity (i.e., willingness, attitudes, and timing factors) should be considered to choose between the different approaches – relationship-oriented and goal-oriented – for an individual forensic outpatient. Regarding these different befriending approaches (Mead et al., 2010; Thompson et al., 2016), our study showed that befriending using a personalized, relationship-oriented approach, rather than goal-oriented approach is expected to be more feasible and valuable in addition to forensic outpatient care. Our findings show that these interventions should primarily focus on the development and maintenance of a social bond between dyads, in which patients are provided with non-directive social support. Patients in our sample preferred a relationship between dyads lying more towards the end of the friendship continuum (Thompson et al., 2016). Therefore, we assume that it is important to select coaches who are able to obtain a flexible and open attitude, and to engage in a reciprocal and sociable relationship. Secondly, building on previous literature suggesting that the duration and frequency of befriending interventions should be tailored to the target population (Siette et al., 2017), interventions with longer duration (e.g., longer than 1 year or without time restrictions) possibly will provide more time to develop a trustful social bond and to provide social support for forensic outpatients. Our results show that patients could need more time to be able to engage in an additional informal social network intervention. Lastly, our findings could inform the development of indication
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