Recruitment

The information you learn from your formative research and conversations with stakeholder partners can help you design your registry in a way that will promote participation. You should design recruitment and enrollment processes that address the barriers and concerns of potential participants and speak to factors that may motivate them to join. In general, you should strive to make it easy for participants to enroll.

For example:

• If you find that transportation is a barrier for an in-person enrollment visit, you might explore online or phone enrollment processes, providing transportation or reimbursing transportation costs, or conducting enrollment visits at a community organization.
• If you find that scheduling is a barrier for an in-person enrollment visit, you might explore offering evening or weekend appointments, providing childcare, or providing options to enroll online.
• If you find that altruism is a motivating factor, you might design recruitment materials that emphasize the potential to help others through participating in research

Health disparities exist for many different health conditions ¹ and response to treatment can vary among different groups of people by characteristics such as race/ethnicity and sex.^2, ^3, ⁴ Diversity among research participants is important, because studies with diverse participants can be applied to wider populations and have greater ability to benefit the general public.

Despite the fact that United States federally funded research is required to emphasize including women and minorities as research participants (for more information, see NIH policy implementation page), women and racial/ethnic minorities continue to be under-represented^2, ⁵.

Researchers can be proactive by considering diversity when planning their recruitment process, and continuing to evaluate the diversity of participants throughout enrollment. Remember that in addition to race, ethnicity, and sex, diversity encompasses other characteristics including gender, age, socioeconomic status, and geography.

Populations that are underrepresented among registry participants may require targeted recruitment efforts. Strategies to consider for recruiting underrepresented populations include:

• Hiring research staff who reflect the characteristics of the population
• Ensuring research staff are fluent in languages spoken by the population
• Partnering with stakeholders, such as community organizations, that represent or serve the population
• Working with stakeholders to develop culturally and linguistically relevant study materials
• Conducting formative research with individuals from the population
• Providing training to research staff to raise awareness about implicit bias and promote cultural competency

Recruitment strategies should be tailored to your registry and the people you are trying to recruit. In other words, your formative work and conversations with stakeholders should guide your selection of recruitment strategies.

Creating effective recruitment materials is an important part of the recruitment process. Strategies for creating high quality, effective materials include:

• Working with stakeholder partners to design recruitment materials and/or asking them to review your materials for clarity and relevance
• Testing your recruitment materials with your target population, such as holding a focus group to obtain feedback
• Considering health literacy of readers and using plain language in recruitment and other study materials