The Right People for the Job Posted on March 1, 2006 Joe Price (bio) discusses the value of paraprofessionals in recruiting participants.

The other challenge we had was getting access to the dataset that would let us know who's a foster parent, who has a child that has come into foster care. We had to have access to that dataset, and that was key. At first, we were going primarily through the receiving homes called the Polinsky Center, and we weren't getting as many subjects as we really needed. One of our field directors, Jan Price, not related to me, actually through a conversation found out there was this other dataset, this master dataset. We asked, 'Can we have access to that?' They said sure, so now we had all the foster parents in San Diego County that we could go through. That made all the difference in the world.

Now I think the other thing that helped in recruitment is our field director Jan Price and the group facilitators are excellent in working with people, just really good, and that's how we chose them. We weren't looking at educational background. We weren't looking for research experience. We were looking at folks that could work with people on a daily basis, people that could run groups and felt comfortable with foster parents. That really helped in terms of being able to talk with them because on the phone they were just regular folks. Here's this Project KEEP; we're trying to help foster parents. It wasn't associated with the University. I mean, I'm at San Diego State, Patti's at Oregon, but Project KEEP was associated with our center in Children's Hospital. Our center's connected with Children's Hospital, and in San Diego, Children's Hospital has a very good reputation in the community. 'Oh, it's with Children's Hospital. OK, that sounds really good.'

But I think really the sell was our recruiter and our group facilitators. Once families expressed an interest, they would go to the home, explain it in detail, do the consent forms, talk with them. They're just really personable and really good at working with folks. We have a couple of folks who just have their associates degrees and bachelors. We didn't have any masters level folks working with us. But the intervention was to be delivered by paraprofessionals. That was our goal. It wasn't any particular educational background that we were looking for.

Those were probably the greatest challenges in our recruitment, and again, probably the hardest sell was, 'You're going to be in the control group, and you're just going to have these assessments.' But there is so much parent training available to them through the county and through the community college that they were going to get it anyway.

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