In my experience, recruiting study participants is one of the most challenging steps in the early stages of a research project. In the past I have typically distributed recruitment flyers that state the benefits the participants are expected to gain, the amount of payment they will receive, and the estimated time they will need to invest. The more participants you need, however, the more cost prohibitive it becomes, so I'm wondering if anyone has successfully employed some creative strategies for incentivizing recruitment while keeping costs to a minimum. For example, a colleague of mine said she once used a raffle in which a certain number of participants had a chance to win prizes. I thought this was an interesting approach and wonder what other methods the research community has used to frugally incentivize study participation.
Thank you!
If I do a study with company managers, I offer to share research results. It often works out. But you are right, it is a challenging part od research. I am also eager to see other researcjers' ideas.
Inviting students to apply, but usual caveats apply. Alternatively when recruiting professionals, if we could not offer "money", we could propose "meaning". What is the importance of our research to them or to the general public?
Hi Professor Kris Ramonda. I would like to share our experience as bureaucrats. We often conduct survey in formulating government policy. The participants are stakeholders of the policy. our experience teach us that we need to explain to the participants how the policy would affect their life, business or welfare. This explanation is crucial as without it the participation rate was usually low. Accordingly, we make sure that such explanation is provided in advance of a survey.
Greetings Dr. Ramonda. Your colleague's recommendation to structure the study as a raffle is an excellent way to recruit participants and has worked in the past for studies I've worked on. A problem we frequently encounter with this type of recruitment is many participants wont enroll in a study with this payment structure unless it can be completed online. If the study can be conducted online you may consider using MTurk or Prolific, which allows you to pay participants very little depending on the length of completion. Advertising your study to potential participants can also be difficult. However, social media can be an interesting way to capture the interest of potential participants by simply snowballing or paying for an advertisement which costs pennies per click. However, I would encourage referencing these guidelines prior to utilizing these platforms:
King, D. B., O'Rourke, N., & DeLongis, A. (2014). Social media recruitment and online data collection: A beginner’s guide and best practices for accessing low-prevalence and hard-to-reach populations. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 55(4), 240.
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