Participant recruitment… it’s the make-or-break of many a research project, so it’s surprising that it’s not addressed more in the literature. It’s as if, once you’ve chosen your research questions, decided on your methodology, and obtained ethical approval, you just close your eyes and, as if with a sprinkling of fairy dust, your data appears….
If only! Truth is, finding people to take part in your study is often the hardest, and most gruelling—emotionally as well as physically—part of your research. And difficulties over recruitment are one of the main reasons why people have to extend their research projects—sometimes by years. So if you want to make sure your research project is a successful one, planning for recruitment is something you need to take seriously, right from the very start.
Who’s busy too?
Why is it so hard to recruit for your study? Well, first, there’s a good chance that most people aren’t really going to want to do it. Sorry. That’s not to say that they’ll be critical of your research or think it’s pointless. It’s just that so many of us are so incredibly busy these days. Think of how you feel when you see an email or a Facebook notice inviting you to take part in some research. ‘Mm, looks kind of interesting,’ but with a hundred plates already spinning in your life, do you really want to take on one thing more? Have you got a spare hour and time to read information sheets and fill in consent forms. With your kids screaming in the next room or your partner who’s just put dinner on the table! So however fascinated you might be with your own research topic; remember that other people are ‘outside’ of your head rather than ‘inside’ of it: caught up in their own world of worries, tasks, and goals.
Touching on sensitivities
Prospective participants may also be reluctant to take part because what we’re inviting them to do is hard, emotionally as well as cognitively. Counselling psychologist Jasmine Childs-Fegredo says:
In a qualitative study for example, you might be asking people quite personal, and possibly even potentially distressing questions, about their past experiences. For a quantitative study, you might be asking participants to undertake a task or complete a survey which they might be worried about finding difficult in some way.
Jasmine goes on to add:
So you need to approach your recruitment strategy really sensitively: from the wording in a recruitment poster to the emails you might send out to participants. Use warmth, empathy, and be professional; enabling people to feel safe and thereby prepared to be in a relationship with you as their researcher.
Rosie Rizq, a former Professor at the University of Roehampton, makes a similar point when she emphasises the importance of developing a collaborative relationship with (prospective) participants right from the very start:
In my experience, many trainees tend to revert to a 'helicopter in/helicopter out' approach to their participants, rather than approaching potential participants with a collaborative mindset that may require particular sensitivity and thoughtfulness. I guess I'm seeing participant recruitment as part and parcel of a wider mindset and epistemology required for projects that might involve highly personal, painful, or sensitive material. Some participants require very careful handling indeed prior to any agreement being signed off; they need to feel a sense of confidence in the researcher and that their material will be treated carefully and respectfully before, during and, most importantly, after interviews.
So recruitment is not something we do to prospective participants; it’s a way, if you like, of initiating a relationship. And as with the start of all relationships it needs to be done with care, sensitivity, and attention.
Awkward!
But there’s another, third, reason why recruitment can be so difficult: because, for us as researchers too, it can just feel so incredibly awkward. Maybe this is just for the introverts amongst us, but I remember, when running psychology experiments for my PhD, just how excruciatingly embarrassed I felt asking people to take part—I wanted to die inside. Perhaps it’s a fear of rejection; perhaps an anxiety about receiving without giving—kind of like ‘pleading’ people to do something. I remember, as a kid, having the same feeling when I’d spent all my money in the arcades and had to beg random strangers for the tube fare home (in fact, I found it so torturous that my best friend, James, always ended up doing the begging for us!). Seriously, though, that awkwardness can create real obstacles towards successfully recruiting for—and completing—a study. You can’t do recruitment if you’re metaphorically hiding behind a wall somewhere, secretly hoping that no-one will notice you.
Be Proactive
So, as a general principal for successful recruitment, a key thing is to be proactive. This doesn’t mean being pushy, demanding, or nagging people when they’ve clearly had enough of you. But it does mean taking active steps to make recruitment happen, being on top of it, and pushing through—where appropriate—your own embarrassment or awkwardness barrier. Remember… there’s no fairy dust. Recruitment will not happen to you. Over the years, I’ve just seen too many research projects fail, or severely stall, because researchers have sat back and waited for participants to arrive rather than actively seeking them out.
Planning recruitment from the start
All this means that a recruitment strategy should be built into your research project from the very start, not an add on once you’re through ethical approval. And if you can’t conceive of viable ways to recruit people to a particular study, it may well be that you need to do something else—there’s no point having a brilliantly designed study if no one is actually able or willing to do it. Those strategies need to be concrete, realistic, and well thought out; and ideally tried-and-tested. Has an organisation, for instance, given initial indications that they would be willing to support recruitment, or have other projects used similar strategies to good effect? Remember, too, that of the many people who are potentially available to take part, most won’t. So if you’re planning, for instance, to interview clients at a service that sees 100 people per year, you might have to assume that at least 80% or so of them won’t be interested—and then of those 20 remaining some will drop out before, or at, the interview. So is that going to leave you with enough participants? However many people you think are going to want to take part in your research, chances are, the final numbers will be even less!
Challenging groups
There’s no doubt that some groups of participants are more difficult to recruit than others. Practitioners are often the easiest to recruit, clients more challenging, and then some groups of clients (for instance, those in prison) next-to-impossible unless you have some specific ‘ins’. The challenges of recruitment with a particular group, however, do need to be weighed up against the value of what research with them will accomplish. So, for instance, although clients may be more difficult to recruit than therapists, they can give much more valuable answers to particular research questions (for instance, ‘How do clients experience therapists’ self-disclosures?’).
If you are planning to conduct research in England which potentially involves ‘research participants identified in the context of, or in connection with, their past or present use of NHS services’ (either as practitioners or clients), you are likely to need NHS REC approval. This can be a time consuming process (3-6 months or more) and one that should be built into any research timeline. Again, though, the value of conducting research with such clients may outweigh the additional demands.
Have a written recruitment plan
A really systematic way to think recruitment through is with a written recruitment plan. This can be done on software like Word or Excel and, in most cases, is something you should be detailing in your ethics submission. List each of the different strategies/channels you’re going to use for recruitment (for instance, Facebook posts, Twitter posts, emails, approaching voluntary organisations), what you’re going to say, when you’re going to do it, and any other relevant details. You can then use that to track recruitment once you’ve started. Are you hitting the timelines you set for your different strategies, and what kinds of responses are you getting? If strategies don’t seem to be successful, strike them out and, where relevant, develop others (but don’t forget that those new strategies might need ethical approval). And, at the end of it all, you can present that plan in the appendix of your thesis: an ‘audit trail’ evidencing how thorough and committed you were in the recruitment process.
Where to recruit from
There’s many different strategies through which you can try and recruit participants, and generally I’d say ‘over do it’ rather than ‘under do it’. That is, given the challenges of finding participants, explore and identify a wider range of strategies than you may actually need, rather than cautiously and conservatively just choosing one or two.
A good starting point is to think where the participants you are looking for may be most likely to ‘congregate’. For instance, do they tend to frequent particular locations (for instance, hospital waiting rooms), or particular online sites (for instance, Reddit ‘subreddits’).
There are numerous places through which you can recruit participants. Some of the most commonly used are:
Social media:
Facebook: personal pages, or on the many counselling/psychotherapy groups
Twitter: use @usernames to add it to the Twitter feeds of organisations like @BACP and @BPSOfficial, or #hashtags (for instance, #counselling)
LinkedIn (widely used by professionals)
WhatsApp groups
Reddit: again, think about groups (‘subreddits’) that may be specific to the topic you’re focusing on.
Professional counselling associations (e.g., BACP, UKCP, BPS, BPS divisions): website notice boards, magazines, or research networks
Service user groups, networks, and charities—both national and local—like MIND or Triumph Over Phobia (see listing here)
Email contacts
Websites: personal, university
Blogs: for instance, write a blog about your planned research, or the background literature to it, for a relevant site; with a link if people are interested in following up
Students: there may be a system, for instance, for psychology undergraduates to participate in research
Conference attendees
Physical notice boards (for instance, at universities or GP surgeries)—although, in my experience, they are not a particularly fruitful method of recruitment
‘Snowball sampling’: asking your participants to recommend further participants
Online recruitment sites (‘mechanical Turks’), like Prolific, where you pay people to complete your survey (this is mainly for large scale, quantitative (and funded!) studies).
Don’t forget that, if your research is conducted digitally (e.g., video conferencing interviews or a web-based survey), you might want to consider recruiting internationally. For instance, if you were looking at the experiences of clients with a particular condition (say counselling for sight loss), you might want to approach service user groups in the US, Canada, and Australia, as well as in the UK (with, of course, the necessary ethical approval in place).
Personally, I’d nearly always suggest to avoid recruiting people you know, and particularly those you know well (and even more particularly your clients). There’s just too many opportunities for biases and demand characteristics to creep in. If they know your a priori assumptions, for instance, it may be very difficult for them to provide a contradictory view. Jasmine Childs-Fegredo adds:
You also need to consider what it may mean to recruit participants from a place you have worked. For example, if you know the staff and some clients in an NHS service which you now want to recruit from, you will need to make sure you are aware of this ‘dual-role’ you have, and approach things with due sensitivity and considering the ethics around that.
Approaching prospective participants
Some general pointers when approaching people to participate in your research:
Be friendly. If you’re cold, disinterested, or aloof you’re likely to immediately put people off. And bear in mind that some times you won’t know that you’re coming across in that way, even if you don’t mean too. If, like me, you have a ‘resting bitch face’, or tend to write quite curt emails, then think about ways of conveying a warmer and more welcoming invite.
It’s nearly always better to personalise your approach: to individuals, to particular groups, to sectors of the population. Most of us hate getting very generic research invites that have obviously just gone out to hundreds of people. It’s immediately off-putting: What’s my incentive to take part if there are hundreds of others like me who can do the same? But if it’s a personalised email, tailored to me (e.g., ‘Dear Mick, given your position as a counselling psychology teacher….’) then I’m much more likely to respond. That, of course, makes the recruitment process more time consuming, but it’s generally worth the payoff: more prospective participants, and prospective participants who feel welcomed into the research, respected, and understood.
Communicate your passion and excitement for your work, and for learning from your prospective participants. If they see it means something to you, it’s more likely to feel meaningful to them too.
It generally a good idea to find ways in which prospective participants can express a very preliminary initial interest before making a more definitive commitment. (In psychology, this is known as the ‘foot in the door’ technique). So, for instance, you could invite people who may be interested to click on a hyperlink (for instance, to a Google Doc) where they can leave their email address to be contacted (make sure it is all GDPR compliant), or you could suggest that they email you for more information before making any commitment.
REcruitment materials
Recruitment materials are, essentially, the ‘adverts’ that you put out there to attract interest. And like any adverts, they have to be carefully thought through. A good place to start might be to reflect on the question (and discuss with peers), ‘What kind of research recruitment materials make me more likely to respond?’ For instance, is it where there’s a more personalised approach, or where it feels meaningful to your own life and concerns? And, importantly, also ask yourself, ‘What kind of research recruitment materials make me instantly hit “delete”?’ For instance, is it when you’re not clear what they’re asking you to do, or if it seems to go on and on with ever-finer details?
Some general pointers about recruitment materials:
Proof them, proof them, proof them… and then get a few friends/colleagues to proof them, proof them, proof them. If your prospective participants are anything like me, they’ll be really put off by misspelt emails or slapdash flyers which seems to change font half way through. After all, if you can’t put enough care into getting your spelling right, what’s that going to say about how you’ll treat your participants? As emphasised throughout this blog, trust is everything!
So try to get a balance between being friendly but professional. You don’t want to come across as too mechanistic or formal (it can feel intimidating), but too informal can also feel overly-casual and potentially unprofessional.
Be sensitive: for instance, putting a research request on Twitter for people who have been ‘traumatised’ could trigger all sorts of responses in some people—many of whom may never actually get in contact with you.
Don’t be pushy. You don’t want to put people under pressure to take part, or feel coerced in any way. So avoid headlines phrases like, ‘Please take part in my research,’ or ‘Participants needed,’ or ‘Would you like treatment for your anxiety?’
Having said that, help participants see the potential benefits of taking part: to themselves, to the therapeutic field, to their wider communities. Remember, chances are they’re looking for reasons not to take part rather than reasons to; so you need to consider what the incentives might be and make those explicit. Of course, as above, you don’t want to be pushy, and you also need to be explicit about any potential risks. But, for instance, many participants can find it really rewarding talking about their experiences, and this is a possibility you can highlight in your information sheet. Also, for many participants, there can be a great deal of value and meaning in contributing to the development of improved mental health treatments and services for all. So if that is a potential impact of your study (and you’ve got a coherent strategy for achieving it) you can make that clear in your recruitment materials.
Length of notices and other written materials is another challenge. Ethically, there’s a lot that you may want/have to say, but it can easily be overwhelming and off-putting for participants if it’s too much, too soon. One option is to disseminate, in the first place, just brief notices or flyers, that prospective participants can then follow up to find out more detailed information.
Tailor your materials to the specific audiences. For instance, a notice on the professional network LinkedIn might have a more serious tone than a post on Twitter, and a face-to-face invite may be framed in a very different way.
Be clear and concrete about what people should do next if they’re interested. Have your email address, for instance, in big and bold on the recruitment email, or a hyperlink for people to click on to sign up. Make it as easy as possible for potential participants to follow through. A good option here may be to have a website that people hyperlink to from social media platforms, that then has more information about the study and clear details of how to contact you. Generally, try to ensure that prospective participants can reach you through hyperlinking—if they have to copy your email/phone number down from a jpg, for instance, they may be a lot less likely to get in touch.
And finally, don’t be weird. It’s an obvious thing to say, and ‘weird’ can mean many different things to different people, but if a prospective participants wants to feel assured that it’s safe to take part, it’s best to keep quirkiness in how you approach people, and what you put on your recruitment materials, to a minimum.
people who know people
Understandably, people may be less likely to respond to your research request if they don’t know who you are. So if you know someone who has contact with prospective participants, you may want to ask them if they can help you in the recruitment process. A research or clinical supervisor, for instance, might have a wide network of people they’d be willing to forward an email on to, or to post on their social media sites. There may also be specialists in the field that you’re looking at who’d be willing to support you by forwarding on recruitment invitations. You can always ask. And you can also add some information about yourself on recruitment sites so that you are less anonymous: even a photo and a brief biography can help prospective participants feel that there is a real and friendly person behind the recruitment process.
If you are wanting to recruit clients into your study, one way of reaching them is through counsellors and psychotherapists. This has to be done with extreme sensitive, though, and without in any way breaching confidentiality. For instance, it would be entirely unethical to ask therapists to pass on contact details of their clients to you so you could email them directly! You also need to make sure that the therapists’ clients are not feeling under any pressure to participate: deference effects means that clients may feel obliged to say ‘yes’ to their therapists, even if they don’t want to. One workable option may be to ask psychotherapists and counsellors to pass on a flyer to their clients giving them information about your study, and then the clients can contact you, in their own time, if they are interested.
Making contact with prospective participants through professional, training, or service delivery organisations is another way of reducing the anonymity of your request and enhancing its ‘legitimacy’. Here, for instance, a counselling service might forward on a request from you to their counsellors or clients; or else they might make the request as an organisation themselves (with you identified as the researcher). In general, recruiting through an organisation can create quite a ‘containing’ frame for research, and in some cases—quite rightly—is the only way in which you would be able to access particular populations (for instance, service users of a domestic violence organisation). If you can align your research with the specific wants and needs of an organisation—for instance, if it will provide evidence on their service effectiveness—they may be particularly keen to support you in it.
Finally, on this point re anonymity, prospective participants may be much more likely to respond to you if they can get a sense of you, as a person, rather than as an unknown name on a flyer. So, for instance, if you can go along and do a talk—even 5 mins—at a service user group, or chat to people over a conference poster, that might really help with response rates. As Jasmine emphasised earlier, people need to feel that you’re safe to open up to: someone known and familiar rather than alien and strange.
Be responsive
If a prospective participant gets in touch with you, respond. Don’t leave it sitting in your email inbox for weeks. It’s an obvious thing to reiterate, but it’s essential to treat prospective participants with courtesy and respect.
If it’s not working…
If your recruitment strategies aren’t working, don’t panic! Give it a bit of time and see what emerges. But if, after a few weeks, you’re still not getting any eligible volunteers, it might make sense to start looking at what adjustments you might want to make.
First issue, of course, is where the ‘blockage’ might be. For instance, is it that no one is making initial contact with you about your research; or is it that they are, but then not following up when you reply. That should give you some clues about where adjustments may be required.
If no one is showing any interest, it generally makes sense—at least initially—to stick with your participant group and look at additional, or alternative, strategies for recruitment. Are there particular networks, for instance, you can make contact with; or alternative social media sites? Here, you may need to balance the coherence and homogeneity that comes from having participants from just one source, against the greater recruitment possibilities that come from broadening things out. With this issue, there’s no right answers; but one thing I would say is to try and have a few from each if you can. For instance, three participants recruited through Facebook and six from snowball sampling can be fine, and you might even be able to say something about the differences between them. But eight from Facebook and one from snowballing leaves the latter a bit of an ‘odd man out.’ We don’t know if their responses are specific to them or to the strategy they were recruited through.
If widening your recruitment strategies still isn’t working, you may need to revisit your participant group and, with it, the specific question you’re looking at. For instance, if you’re exploring the psychotherapy experiences of Kenyan men, would expanding that to East African men, or men across all of Africa, make for a more viable recruitment process? Here, as above, you’re striving to strike a balance between having a scope that is broad enough for successful recruitment, but narrow enough to make your research project meaningful and coherent. Again, no right answers; but being open to adjusting your design, where necessary, can be a real advantage.
Use supervision
Remember to make use of support from your research supervisor(s). Jasmine Childs-Fegredo says:
Should you be experiencing issues with recruitment, it’s worth getting in contact with your supervisor(s) in the first instance, to talk through what you could do going forwards, and then report back to them as and when things start moving or if you need further support. Supervisors generally have the experience to nip things in the bud early on, and may have ideas you have not previously thought of. It’s best not to just leave things, and expect things to get better without some support. Supervisors are busy people and may not be able to see you immediately, but it’s always worth getting an advance meeting in the diary with them to discuss where you are in your recruitment strategy.
What does the research say?
In thinking through strategies for recruitment, it may also be very helpful to consult the research on what works and doesn’t work, says our former PsychD Course Convenor, Mark Donati. For instance, you can find papers like, ‘Factors influencing recruitment to research: qualitative study of the experiences and perceptions of research teams’, or how about this one: ‘Swiss chocolate and free beverages to increase the motivation for scientific work amongst residents: a prospective interventional study in a non-academic teaching hospital in Switzerland’! There may also be papers on recruitment for your particular participant group, for instance, ‘Overcoming barriers to recruiting ethnic minorities to mental health research: a typology of recruitment strategies’ and ‘Recruitment and retention of older minorities in mental health services research’. When you write up your research project, being able to report that you used research, itself, to direct your methodological choices can look very impressive.
In conclusion
Plan, be realistic, be proactive, and flexibly adjust if things aren’t working out…. That sounds like the recipe for a successful life, so no surprises that it also holds for successful research recruitment. And, of course, as Rosie and Jasmine emphasised, be sensitive, collaborative, and kind. Even if that doesn’t get you the most participants, it’s the ethical and right thing to do. Remember that you’re part of a wider research community, and successful enquiry, across the board, requires research participants to feel like they are valued participants in that process—not just ‘subjects’ that get discarded when the research is done. So approach prospective participants with a spirit of genuine openness and dialogue.
Mark thought I should end this blog on an upbeat note, and he’s absolutely right. Yes, it’s hard work; yes, it can be a struggle; but the sense of satisfaction, excitement, and sheer relief you can get from having all your data finally collected—and in a robust, ethical, and caring way—is second to none. So, if it’s seeming (or feeling right now), like an uphill struggle, keep your eye on that prize. With proactiveness, persistence, and creativity, you’ll get there for sure.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to trainees and tutors on the PsychD Counselling Psychology Programme at the University of Roehampton for suggestions and advice. Photo: Maya, by Daniel Walford.
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