Please start by reading about sampling and particularly sampling methods.

The exact method you’ll use to recruit participants depends on your time availability and requirements.

Ask your friends, colleagues, family, and wider network to help you with research.

Source participants for your study via online communities like slack , reddit etc.

Find research participants over social media including Facebook and LinkedIn groups are great for this.

With these participant recruitment tactics, I am positive you wouldn’t dread finding research participants like you would without all the know-how. Work out which method will suit your requirements and get started with your research work.

Regards,

Hello @Arlene.

Please tell us what have you done so far to contact and select participants. Thank you.

Hello, Arlene Ghahremani !

Fix people whom you want to engage in your study and try to contact them. Read ample articles to get a clear idea about sampling or issues like these. Recently I have conducted a qualitative research on online education and reached private university students from Bangladesh. This is how I specified the target people for my study. Best wishes and welcome to this community of researchers. I get enlightened with these precious souls of researchers.

I agree with Robertson K. Tengeh , it is very important to first establish the sampling technique that will be used. E.g. if you are are using convenience sampling, the you could interview, family, friends, affiliates, etc. as recommended by Ajit Singh . If you use snowball sampling, then you could ask those you interviewed for other participant recommendations that meet your selection requirements.

For a qualitative approach, the most common sampling technique used is purposive sampling. This will enable you to identify participants according to some specific criteria.

So, the question you ask yourself who are the participants you're looking for? e.g. experts, couple who experienced infidelity in their relationship etc.

If you're looking for the couple who experienced that, I believe that'll be a bit challenging given that issues of this nature are quite sensitive and people prefer to keep them as confidential as they can.

Not so easy to ......... But you need to get participants who have experienced the situation. Agree with Abubakar Abubakar Usman and the others

My inclusion criteria/ target population is as follows;

1. Couples who are married

2. experienced infidelity and successfully navigated through it

3. and are still married after the infidelity

So far, I have posted a flyer in virtual forums such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and other virtual social platforms and virtual groups. I have also shared it with colleagues, friends, family, and universities.

I feel like I’ve advertised everywhere that I am able to…

What is your specialty? Have you tried posting in a forum for an organization? I have heard that has been helpful or social media, giving incentives such as a gift card or something like that. Hope this helps.

How to find your participants requires answers to the following questions:

1. What are your research questions? Your research questions should be specific enough to tell you and readers who, where, when you are going to study. It means you have a clear picture of people, space, and time.

2. What are your research methodology that helps direct the whole research process? Answering this means you need to choose, say, among many qualitative approaches, such as narrative study, case study, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography, art-based methods, etc. Read Creswell (2007) Choosing among five approaches. Research methodologies help you incorporate those three dimensions (people, space, time) to design a sound research process to reflect your research questions.

3. What are your data collection methods? Once you've chosen the methodology and design, you need to think about how to collect data. Interviews, focus groups, autobiography, online interview, documentary and archival records, or art-based methods and so on (see Yin (2014) case study, or Patton (2002)). They need to be suitable to your overall questions and research design.

4. What are your sampling strategies? Strategy refers to specific ways of selecting, approaching, recruiting your research participants for each of your data collection method (see Patton (2002) Qualitative research and evaluative methods for more). So that, sampling strategies for in-depth interviews with households will be different from focus groups with households.

In qualitative research, sampling strategies need to be purposive, that is, to be designed to pursue some specific criteria that help answer the research questions. You need to come back your research questions and methodology to inform this selection.

5. What are your resources and constraints? Think about the resources such as finance, time, energy, support of locality (government, people), situations (e.g., COVID-19 and restrictions on mobility), etc. to decide how many people and how long your fieldwork you want. Think about your access to the gatekeeper and local people of the research sites, about your connections to facilitate these accesses. Be realistic!

After answering these questions will help you identify the research participants.

Hope this helps.

Best, kien

Snowball sampling might help. Please read about it. Thanks.

Purposive sampling or snowball sampling technique can be used. Or you can include all married & unmarried men & women randomly selected and collect data. Because infidelity is there in all relationships like, among lovers, living together or married.

Getting participants in this kind of study is difficult as other people mentioned above. But it is possible to get, especially that it is qualitative study and no need for large sample. You can get sample by the following ways:

1. From court

2. From religious leaders

3. From traditional leaders

This is because some of these cases are resolved in these three places.

However, you don't need to request to know the couples. Thus phone interview or discussion is the best. If you request to know the couples, you may not succeed.

You need to lias with the above three agents. Let them understand that you need to talk to the people through phone and you don't need to know them. The agents will contact the participants and get their consent on your behalf.

The participants phone number should not be used in the conversation, because it is their identity. Thus you should provide another phone number to participants.

I believe in the area of the study there are many courts, many religious leaders and many traditional rulers. If you do it well, convince the agents to cooperate with you, you can get a good number of participants for qualitative study.

All the best

https://www.findparticipants.com/

Did you read previous research in your field? There you can find out how researchers searched for participants. It would be more simple with quantitative data as this is a quite sensitive topic and people simply do not want to talk about it in person, but a survey could work.

Depending on your Research you have to select sampling technique.

For qualitative study-Purposive or Snow ball sampling is the best one

@ArlArlene Ghahremani hi! can you please share your research questions as I'm also working on this topic of infidelity. I'll be really thankful to you