Retaining Families in Ethnographic Research Posted on March 19, 2007 Hirokazu Yoshikawa (bio) provides some suggestions for keeping participants in a study.

Retention is very difficult and there's a lot of challenges to it. Basically, we try to throw every technique at these families including when multiple phone calls don't work, doing drop bys, sending gifts, trying to contact multiple contacts, if they've given contact information, multiple people in their social networks. So, it's much easier for an ethnography. In our qualitative work, we visit families every 10 weeks, and so that rapport develops over time. It's certainly easier to retain families in that kind of format than survey or home visit format where you're only visiting once a year, that kind of thing.

But we put an enormous amount of effort into those drop bys, neighborhood visits, and really trying to kind of stay in contact with them, newsletters. And I think families really appreciate, for example, if you do a videotaped session with them to actually give them a copy of the video, these days, more on a CD than videotapes. So, those kinds of things really keep them involved.

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