Think Creatively Posted on October 22, 2007 Rachel Manber (bio) provides recruitment advice.

I think the most challenging aspect of research, once you have the funds to do it, is recruitment. It turns out that in research protocols we want a very specific population, and reaching the amount is not as easy as we think, based on our clinical practice where we see lots of these patients.

The issue is that there is a lot of constraints and exclusion criteria that our patients come in with to clinic and they might not qualify therefore, for research protocol. So, what is important in solving this problem is to not hear – what not to do is not to rely on other clinicians referring patients to you, because my experience, and other people I talk to, repeatedly find that that is not a good source of recruitment unless you yourself sit in the same clinic and you continuously hassle other people to refer qualified patients to you.

It’s also very difficult to recruit from your own clinic to your research, because then you have the competing demands of being a clinician and being a researcher. What are the alternatives? The alternatives are to really target – to think very creatively about targeting the recruitment to the specific population to where this specific population is.

For example, I’m doing research on depression in pregnant women. So it will not be a very cost-effective way for me to advertise in general newspapers, though it can be tried. Instead what we opted to do is, we kept thinking, “Where do these women go?” Well, they read baby magazines, they read parenting magazines. They go to baby stores, they go to prenatal classes. So if you kind of start thinking of where is your population likely to be, that’s going to be a great help. And every time you get stuck, you have to keep thinking of more creative ideas, because without participants you can’t do research, so that’s essential.

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