A colleague and I are currently running an international survey aimed at the global Human Factors and Ergonomics (HF/E) community, asking them (in english) for their personal understanding of words that have to do with social sustainability. An explorative study of a specific profession's terminology use, you might say.
Recruitment has been mainly conducted online, in the form of spreading the survey link via the following channels:
- email lists to participants at various HF/E conferences
- spreading the survey with a short description in specialized interest groups on social media like LinkedIn and Facebook
- posting the survey link on interest groups' websites (which is dependent on personal contacts)
- Asking personal contacts for aid with spreading the survey among their peers.
Survey participants were given the option of giving their email address if they were interested in getting follow-ups of the results.
After the survey had been out for about 2 months, we had 61 participants with a skewed over-representation of certain countries, so we decided to try and boost interest in the survey by releasing some descriptive info of the sample to previous participants, e.g. the nationality, gender distribution and represented application areas of the sample (but of course no actual results of the pertinent questions asked). We tried to 'liven this up' by making a short infographic video, which was then emailed to previous survey participants and posted on all the social media groups that were previously approached.
It has so far been an interesting challenge to get participation for the survey in what I can only assume is a general online buzz of distractions and requests for people's attention - in this, our survey may come out of nowhere asking for 10-15 minutes of a HF/E professional's time, meaning that the only apparent motivator for participating in the survey is a genuine willingness to help and an interest in learning what our community says about these issues.
Since the recruitment approach could be best described as "snowball recrutiment", where we have a purposive sample and hope for participants and contacts to spread the message onward, we cannot say (other than an educated guess) how many potential respondents we reached (because there is no guarantee that every single person logging in to social media forums actually sees the posting, due to e.g. news filtering functions in LinkedIn) compared to how many actually answered.
Has anyone else faced similar recruitment challenges regarding creation of interest, increasing the outreach and keeping the sample representative; and if so, what are your thoughts?
For anyone who's curious, here's the video link:
http://youtu.be/UQBOT-rMZ_s
Snowballing, social outreach and a representative sample seldom mesh. I'd decide what is most important to achieve your core objectives, then adjust recruitment.
Also, asking about "personal understanding" of terminology sounds like a test from which few respondents typically anticipate anything of value. Therefore, you might consider adding something into the survey that would appear more likely to produce compelling aggregate data, and/or some other incentive to participate (a proprietary download link at the end of the survey, for example).
Thanks for your thoughts - the ones about possible incentives are helpful input, thanks Laurie.
I think one of the major challenges is that we're using an online approach to reach a community that doesn't necessarily spend much on the internet or on social media as part of its culture. As far as rapid outreach goes, it beats mailing people a paper survey, but at the same time, it's also easier to ignore.And I have a feeling that many of the professionals we want to reach spend most of their online time in their email inbox, if anything...
I spoke with a viral marketing expert, and he said something akin to what you said, Cecilia: that you need to figure out the language of the group you're trying to target, and where they "hang out" online. This in itself has been a challenge, but I did realize today that we haven't actually tried Twitter - of course, I am doubtful that answering the survey will be very comfortable on a smartphone on the go, but that just might let us reach a few more tech-savvy HF/E professionals via hashtags...
I do believe that snowballing was the only way to extend the outreach beyond my colleague's and my own personal networks, which tend to overlap quite a bit, and in order not to skew the sample of Human Factors/Ergonomics practitioner profiles to the ones that we ourselves belong to.
But in the end, it's been a very interesting challenge from a "marketing point of view, something I cannot say that I as a researcher have much prowess in, but am having to rethink every day... :)
This has Paired sample statistics and significance t tests
http://etd.aau.edu.et/dspace/bitstream/123456789/4290/1/BELAY%20ZELEKKE.pdf
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