Learning from Recruitment Mistakes Posted on July 24, 2007 Christopher L. Edwards (bio) developed a recruitment model to address problems he encountered in previous studies.

It is of interest that the Capital Investment Model that we developed for recruitment could easily be re-titled, “Research mistakes of my group and my colleagues.” And that is, we really looked at research failures where we failed to recruit adequately. And in a very exposed and introspective way, asked questions, “Is it the subjects’ fault that they did not come or was it our fault?”

And nine out of ten times what we found was we did not provide adequate incentives. We did not address the issues that were obstacles. We did not provide a study that was inspirational to the population that we were trying to serve. And in every case, we could look back and see research failures, not subject failures.

And because of that, we developed a model that specifically addressed subject and research failures, but more importantly, research failures, how can a researcher screw up a study.

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