Issues From Selecting Flexible Incentive Practices in Recruiting Students for Health-Related Qualitative Studies

Abstract

Recruiting student participants for research studies in academic settings is a common practice in the scientific community across many fields. Researchers gain deeper insight from the information elicited from these participants. Student participants also benefit from being exposed to real research activities, which sometimes determine their subsequent career choices. However, recruiting students for such studies is non-trivial. Often, the researchers have to devise an incentive structure to attract diverse students to their studies. There are numerous incentive schemes offered by researchers—starting from offering free items (e.g., T-shirts, mugs), gift cards, and even extra credits. In this case study, we examine the effect of incentive structures on student recruitment and participation using a qualitative case study. We began with offering the most basic incentive—a free university T-shirt—and then revised it to offer extra course credits. We compare student recruitment rate under these two incentive schemes. Our observations revealed that students signed up for the study in batches over time, and the quality of participation toward the end of the semester degrades appreciably as compared to the participants interviewed at the beginning of the semester. Given this observation, we recommend that if the target population appears to be difficult to recruit from, the researchers need to develop several alternative recruitment and incentive strategies.

locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles