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Asked by anon-282392 on 3 Mar 2021.
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Ellen Smith answered on 3 Mar 2021:
Hi Hannah! Really good question, this is honestly one of the most difficult parts of my job. The studies that I run are quite large (over 100 participants) and need specific people to take part (certain ages, without some health conditions and with a certain BMI range), they are also asking quite a lot of people (as they have to come into the research lab multiple times, for a long time and do difficult tasks). So it can be really difficult to get the amount of people that you need.
There’s a few ways I’ve found make it easier, such as: paying your participants (but you need the funding to do this) and maximising the amount of people who see your advert for research – for this I sent out letters to random address’ and gyms/social centres, we have a research centre Facebook page so I use that and you can ‘boost’ the post so more people see it. I’ve also advertised in newspapers, on local transport and more! As a lot of my participants work full time I also worked weekends to fit them in when it was more convenient to them.
So, in short, it can be really hard depending on the type and number of people that you need. It’s a very time consuming part of my job. For the first study of my PhD I had 1600+ people get in touch for information, to end up with 110 participants total!
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David McGonigle answered on 4 Mar 2021:
I’d completely agree with Ellen – it can be challenging! My experiments can be quite long: the brain stimulation ones, for example, involve my participants coming back at least once on a different day (this is so that we have a ‘control’ condition to compare the actual stimulation effects to). Not everyone wants to make that kind of commitment!
Then there’s the screening – making sure the people I study aren’t in any danger from the electrical stimulation and aren’t taking any medications that may mess up our results. I am *very* conservative when it comes to safety, so, for example, if you ever bumped your head and blacked out? No experiment! Perhaps you know of one member of your family that has epilepsy (a brain disorder where parts of the brain tend to be abnormally excitable)? No experiment! And the list goes on and on…From an initial list of about 200 people that express an interest, I’m lucky to end up with around 20! And I pay them, as well! -
Anon answered on 4 Mar 2021: last edited 4 Mar 2021 11:08 am
Hi Hannah! Recruiting participants can certainly be a challenge. My research has all been with children, teenagers, parents and school staff, usually using interviews or focus groups.
Doing research with children and young people is fantastic, but it takes a lot of time to organise and I need the permission of the school and parents as well as the young people themselves, every step of the way. Sharing the information about the research and recruiting participants can take quite a long time, as schools are such busy places (as you know!). I am always incredibly grateful to the schools, families and children who do have the time and the space available to talk to me.
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Lisa Orchard answered on 4 Mar 2021:
Hi Hannah! It can be really tricky and you have to be really mindful of this when designing your study. The first study I ever did took over half hour to complete loads of questionnaires, and I soon realised that was asking too much of people’s time!
I think it’s really important to think about who you want to take part in the study and the benefits fro taking part. In my latest study I am interviewing breastfeeding mothers about their social media use. I advertised on breastfeeding groups and made it clear that I wanted to do the research to help understand the best ways we can use social media to support breastfeeding families. I had so many emails asking to take part! People really wanted their voices to be heard. In fact I had too many to interview! So in answer to your question, it really does depend on the research you are doing.
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Alex Baxendale answered on 4 Mar 2021:
This is definitely one of the biggest issues we all face! Fortunately, my university requires Psychology students to participate in a certain amount of research every year, so we get a good amount from this – but if we need specific types of people (maybe someone with diabetes, or people under the age of 18) it can be very tricky! Offering money usually helps, but it can still take a very long time to get enough people
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Amrita Bains answered on 4 Mar 2021:
Hi Hannah this is great question! When I conducted research before the pandemic normally I would work with students in schools, so normally I would contact schools to see if they were interested in any of the work I was doing and whether they would let us come in to work with some of the students. Or, if I was working in one of the labs at the university I would see people all the time and even run experiments which used brain imaging equipment (which I can’t do right now!).
Right now it is a bit more difficult to find participants but I think it depends on the type of research you are doing and whether any of it can be made in to an online experiment because that way you can find many participants from all over the world.
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Gwen Brekelmans answered on 4 Mar 2021:
Hi Hannah, that’s a great question! Normally, there’s two types of participants I work with for my research: about half are adults, and the other half are actually primary school children. The adults aren’t too difficult to find as there’s lots of students at university who take part in research for their degrees, but the primary school children are a lot harder! My research tends to take place in the school itself, and then I might get children to play language games for a short time on multiple days so it takes some time out of the school as well. So it involves emailing a lot of schools to see if they might be interested, and also have the time to help with the research! Since schools have many other things to do as well and they can’t just decide to do extra things too often, this can take a long time and is the trickiest part of my research, I think! I once emailed about 200 schools to see if they were interested and only got about 3 or 4 schools back who said they would be able to help! Once a school has said they want to help, then the children can still decide whether they want to play or not, but usually they are quite happy to miss out on some lessons to play some language games 🙂
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Harry Piper answered on 5 Mar 2021:
It has always been hard to recruit participants, but for me, I actually think recruitment was easier online than in person. It meant people didn’t have to come in and they could do it in their own time, not when it was convenient for me! When we move back to in-person and I use other tech (e.g. eye tracker) I imagine it will get a bit harder again!
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Dennis Relojo-Howell answered on 5 Mar 2021:
Hi Hannah. During my MSc (which was before the pandemic), I flew to the Philippines to carry out my research. I was trying out a writing intervention to promote positive body image. It’s difficult because I have to get permission to carry out my research from two universities. But’s doable and I certainly enjoyed that long arduous process!
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Dennis commented on :
Hi Hannah. The last time I did research was for my MSc project (back in 2013). My participants were 50 university students from Southeast Asia, so I needed to fly there. Before I went there, I need to do some paper works like informed consent (agreement from the participants to take part), permission from the university, etc. I also did a bit of briefing to my participants.
So in short, it a lot of work and time-consuming. But I won’t call it difficult because it’s doable.