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Recruiting children for behavioral research projects can be challenging, especially if the project is focused on special populations, such as children with SLI or Down syndrome. Ensuring that the sample recruited is representative of the population of interest is a further challenge. Indeed, many studies are based on samples that are more educated and affluent and less ethnically and racially diverse than the general population, which severely limits the generalizability of findings. Recruitment is further complicated by well-motivated but sometimes complex regulations and constraints imposed by Institutional Review Boards or other regulatory bodies. Once recruited, further challenges arise in retaining participants in the sample, especially in projects that require extended participation but offer no immediate benefit to the participant, other than contributing to science. In this presentation, I will briefly discuss the changing scope of the IRB and impact of HIPAA on research. I will also share strategies we have developed at the Waisman Center of the UW-Madison for facilitating recruitment of participants, focusing on both the successes and failures as I do so. I also will share strategies I have developed in my own research program for recruiting and retaining participants in longitudinal studies of language development in youth intellectual disabilities. It is my hope, however, that this will be a highly interactive session, with audience members sharing their own experiences, both positive and negative, with participant recruitment so that we can all be more successful in recruiting and retaining representative samples in our research. |
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