Why Recruitment Fails Posted on July 23, 2007 Christopher L. Edwards (bio) explains why some patients may fear research.

A big part of effective recruitment has much to do with understanding why recruitment fails. And that includes items and issues like fear, patient fear. Patients often fear research because they don’t understand research. They’ve not been sufficiently educated about what research is and what the mission of research is.

Often historical ills, like Tuskegee, a well-known research ill characterizes and negatively colors research for many patients. There are many things that have to be done in terms of groundwork before you actually face-to-face attempt to recruit patients.

Some of that includes community-level education. Some of that includes working with stakeholders in the community, churches, civic organizations, fraternities, sororities, getting their buy in, making sure that they understand the mission that you’re trying to achieve, and ultimately then going face-to-face with individual patients and populations.

It’s important to also understand that some of the fears that patients have are legitimate, that they’re not all abstract. They’re not all incorrect. They’re not all bad cognitions. They really are fearful, in many cases, for legitimate reasons, and that is, researchers have not always done what we should have been doing to protect subjects, to make sure that their data was maintained in a way that was not exploitative, to make sure that our research adequately represented those populations that we’re trying to serve.

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