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Recruiting Healthy Controls

Posted on July 29, 2009

Advertise research as a learning experience, recommends Kiki D. Chang (bio).


Recruiting healthy controls. This is a great thing to talk about for general researchers because a lot of people do this. And depending on who you are with or not, it can be really difficult, and I can say that for us, it's really difficult.

To find healthy kids where you have to get their parents in, and then you have to draw their blood, and they have four hours of interviews, and they get in a scanner. What kind of parent wants to do that to their child?

It's very challenging. Some of the things that we do are, first of all, Craigslist — fantastic advertising. Free, in most cases, volunteers. So we do that. Of course, all our advertising goes through the IRB, so you've got to make sure you do that first.

But youth groups and schools, if you get permission, again, through the IRB, to give talks at schools. And one of the things we're hitting up now is our Girl Scout troops and Boy Scout things. The reason that we're doing this is because you can get a lot out of it because it's a very interesting thing to do. You don't think about it, but if you're interested in going into medical research or into psychiatry, you can get a picture of your brain, you can see how this works, you see how research works, you understand, you learn about it. It's an experience. And we try to bill it as that. It really is. But at the end of the day, they are volunteering completely.

But they do get something out of it and all volunteers get something out of it, whether it's just feeling like they're helping or because it's a good experience. And they get reimbursed for their time as well too, which is really important to be able to do.

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Excerpted from interview with researcher at the 2009 Career Development Institute for Psychiatry in Palo Alto, CA.

 

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