Creative Retention Methods Posted on December 10, 2007 In locating hard-to-find participants for follow-up, there is a fine line between persistence and annoyance, says John E. Bates (bio).

The other bottom line thing for me on research, and this pertains to the longitudinal research, one of the key problems in longitudinal research is people going missing or people not really wanting to continue all that much, and I mean participants. And so the research coordinators and other staff really have to be very dedicated to getting difficult people.

If you get this 60 or 70% of the sample who are easy to get, that’s rewarding of course, and we really appreciate those people. But especially in a longitudinal study on the development of problem behavior, you really want people who are difficult as well, so we make a big point of making lots of efforts to contact people and find a way to work with them.

There are hundreds of techniques and that’s one of the things that I especially appreciate about my coordinators, is that they are creative about finding people and connecting with them. So, lots of Internet finding tools, talking to people. We’ve had people going out and knocking on doors to talk to neighbors, former neighbors of people we want to find, and lots and lots of different ways of finding where people have gone. And another thing that is happening now, more and more and I haven’t really got a solution to it, but people are screening their calls and more and more it’s becoming socially acceptable not to return the phone calls.

So, it’s becoming another challenge to connect to people. So even if you do have their phone number, you may have a hard time getting a hold of them. So, we’re trying lots of different ways to connect to people and ways to leave messages and times to call and how persistent to be without being annoying.

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