Chocolate Cake and Hair Dye Posted on March 1, 2006 John B. Reid (bio) shares anecdotes about what has to be done to keep participants involved.

So I would be having 2 or 3 supervisory sessions a week, and I'd meet the morning after the intervention group and say "Hey, how did it go?" "Oh somebody didn't show up." "So did you phone them up and what did they say?" And we would work out little clinical strategies, and I'll give you two examples.

One was there was sort of a... You know we're talking 15 years ago; we're talking Eugene, Oregon, a lot of methamphetamines and stuff going on there, and there was a particular young woman who wasn't showing up, and so the interventionist went out to her house. When she got there, there was a bong sitting on the coffee table and the woman had sort of dyed hair but it had sort of grown half out. She would say, "I am not going to go to those groups because they're going to think I'm a freak". And so this person actually went over to Buy-Mart or whatever and got some hair dye. So, really, this person sat down with her and said, "What's it gonna take?"

I had another person who basically the father wouldn't come, and so she said "What's it going to take to get you to come? My boss John Reid is threatening to fire me because I can't get people to come to the group". One was, "Well, if you would bake me a cake" - and I think the father liked German Chocolate cake - "I would come". Well she did that. She actually did it, and I think the guy was like really embarrassed not to come.

And going out to the homes, we actually costed it out, and it basically raised the price of the intervention by an average of $16 a head.

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