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6 Recruitment, Screening, and Selection of Participants

Once you have developed a schedule for your focus groups and selected your sites, you’re ready to start the process of finding and screening potential participants for your focus groups. This chapter will prepare you for what you might expect as you go through this phase of your project.

What system do you use for fielding calls from interested parents?

Before recruitment can begin, you will need a system in place for fielding phone calls from interested parents and screening them as potential participants, so that the appropriate phone number can be put on the recruitment materials before you distribute them. You might choose to set up a toll-free number that routes the calls to your office where one or two staff members field the calls centrally and conduct the screenings. Or, you could have the community groups field the calls and screen parents using a local phone number. Sometimes community groups will recommend this arrangement if they think parents in their community would hesitate to call an unknown entity at a toll-free number.

In weighing these options keep in mind that you will have less control over the screening process if the community groups field the calls, especially if you are not able to be on site when the calls come in. Despite being trained on the importance of consistency, there’s always the danger that some screeners may improvise or change questions in the script in reaction to what a caller says, and you might never know it. Such inconsistencies could seriously affect the mix of parents you are able to get or bias the content of the focus group discussions. Using community group screeners is probably less of a risk if the focus of your topic is narrow enough that they are asking only one or two questions before inviting parents. But if the scope of your research requires more extensive questioning on the screening forms, then you may want more control over the process by having staff from your own organization do the screening. Also keep in mind that the more people you involve in the screening process, the greater the risk that promises of confidentiality may be breached.

How do you recruit parents who fit the criteria of your target population?

Once your system for fielding calls is in place and the phone number is put on your recruitment materials, you are ready to begin the process of finding parents for your focus groups. As any researcher will tell you, recruitment can be the most unpredictable aspect of a focus group project. You need to begin with some assumptions about what strategies will work with the population and how many parents are likely to respond to your recruitment efforts. Based on these assumptions, you can determine the number of focus groups to hold, the ideal mix of parents you would like included, and how you might group the parents into specific sessions.

Be prepared, however, for these original assumptions to be incorrect! You may not attract as many parents as you had anticipated. While every researcher wants to recruit as large a pool as possible in order to produce the richest information, it’s important to remember that focus group participants are not meant to represent a statistically valid sample of any larger population. As long as your recruitment strategies involve a wide variety of sources and produce enough eligible parents to allow you to hold a reasonable number of focus groups, the credibility of your findings will not be compromised. (See Field Note.)

Field Note

In our special needs project, recruitment was much slower than we had anticipated. Despite a wide and diversified recruitment effort, our pool simply wasn’t large enough to give us the luxury of choosing among eligible parents and grouping them in any prescribed way. As calls trickled in, we were fortunate if we found enough parents who met our basic criteria to go ahead and schedule a group. We were forced to make a number of mid-course adjustments to our recruitment strategies—from doubling the stipend we offered parents to having the local school systems send flyers home in the backpacks of all of their elementary school students. In one community these changes produced calls almost immediately while in another they seemed to make no difference at all! One step that proved invaluable in gauging the effectiveness of these recruitment strategies was to have our screeners ask parents how they heard about the project.

CAUTION

Try not to become so wedded to any one recruitment strategy that you delay making needed changes if recruitment is slow. No matter how carefully you plan ahead, nothing will completely eliminate the unpredictability of this phase of your project. Trial and error is the key to surviving it!

How long should the recruitment process take?

Ideally, recruitment should not be done too far in advance of when you plan to hold your focus group: you do not want to increase the risk of parents not being able to attend because of a change in schedule. A two-week time period is ideal.

Of course, if recruitment goes slowly, you may have to give up that ideal, delay your scheduled focus group session, and continue to recruit until you have enough eligible parents to hold a focus group. Early callers will need to be put “on hold” while you adjust and intensify your recruitment efforts. (See Field Note.)

	Field Note
	Because recruitment for our special needs project was taking so long, we had a system for regularly calling back those parents screened early in the process. We were able to keep them posted on our progress and make sure they were still interested in participating. The parents seemed very understanding, and most did eventually attend one of our sessions.

What sources are best for recruiting parents?

Your strategies for locating and recruiting parents will vary to some degree from community to community, and the sources you choose will depend on the nature of your research questions. The community groups you have chosen to work with will be an excellent source of advice about these issues. Again, the goal is to insure that a mix of circumstances and experiences is represented among the parents in your focus groups. To accomplish this you should choose the widest possible range of sources for parents who fit the criteria you have set for your target population. Say, for example, you wish to find out what parents’ experiences are in accessing child care. If you use Head Start as your sole source of parents you will miss the diversity of circumstances—type of child care used, income range of family, age of child—that will allow you to fully understand the policy issues involved. Perhaps you want to learn about the adequacy of access to services for children with special needs: you will want to go to early intervention programs that serve this population; but you will also want to go to more generic sources (e.g., community centers, churches) to locate families whose children may not be receiving any services, despite their special needs.

How do you publicize the focus groups through the sources you’ve selected?

Once you have decided on the best sources for locating parents, you need to determine the most effective ways to publicize the focus groups. Again, your community groups will be an important source of advice about which methods might be most effective with the parents in their community. (See Appendix E for a list of the types of sources you might use for recruiting low-income parents and ideas for publicizing your project.)

Once that’s decided, your last step in the recruitment phase is to distribute your publicity materials to all the sources you have identified. You may also be able to give presentations to likely groups of parents. The staff of the community groups should be able to help you with this part of the process.

How do you screen callers?

Once calls begin to come in, whoever is designated to do the screening will use the screening tool you have developed to collect information from the parents. It may work well to establish voicemail for callers to leave messages expressing their interest so that screeners are not bombarded throughout the day with calls.

Keep in mind the following points during the screening process:

Training. Before they begin to field calls, train screeners to keep to the script when talking to parents. Make sure they don’t convey to callers through their words or tone that there is a certain message you want to hear in the focus group sessions. You might role-play to allow them to practice asking the questions.

Confidentiality. Make sure parents understand that the information shared during the screening call will be kept confidential; if community groups screen, make it clear that they need to return screening forms to your office in order to protect the confidentiality of callers.

Parents without phones. Be aware that screening only by phone may exclude families who can’t afford telephone service; the very families who might be most at risk. Look to community groups for help in recruiting parents from at least a few families without phone service; they may be able to leave the number of a relative or neighbor who can find them when you call back.

Language barriers. Make sure that your voicemail message includes information in the language of any subpopulation you are recruiting. Anyone assigned to screen non-English speakers needs to be trained in your screening process.

Clear expectations. Because the name of the community group will be listed on the recruitment flyers, some participants may come to the focus group session thinking they will receive assistance or services.

To avoid disappointment, make sure that parents understand during the screening process that the purpose of these sessions is to learn about their experiences so improvements in programs and policies can be made. (See Chapter Six for a discussion of outreach materials and your ethical obligations to parents.)

What happens during thefinal selection process?

If you are using only the threshold criteria to select participants, you might have screeners invite parents during the initial screening call as soon as they determine that the person meets your criteria. However, if your screening questions are more extensive, and you have attracted a large enough pool of eligible parents, then you will want to review the information collected before inviting anyone to determine who best represents the mix of demographic factors and family circumstances you
desire.

How many participants should attend each group?

For most focus group sessions, eight participants constitutes a manageable size for letting people “have their say” and for analyzing the results; the facilitator will not need to become overly involved in order to keep the group under control, and participants will have more time to speak. Larger groups also increase the likelihood of side-conversations. However, if you are dealing with particularly sensitive issues, you may want fewer than eight participants. In our special needs project, we found that groups of five worked much better because of the emotions that surfaced in the discussions. Experts suggest that you over-select by 20 percent to account for no-shows. Invite 10-12 parents to get 8-9 participants.

Ideally, experts say that you should have at least four participants in a focus group. If no-shows cause the group to slip below that number, you can cancel the session, but you should still pay stipends to those who show up as a gesture of appreciation.

You might be confronted with the opposite situation if uninvited participants show up. You can include all of them in the group provided that the group’s total number does not exceed 10 to 12 and the information on their registration form demonstrates that they meet your eligibility criteria. If you do have to turn away any of these parents, you are under no obligation to pay them a stipend since they were never screened or invited by your staff.

How do you group parents into focus group sessions?

The comfort level of parents is your most important consideration when you begin to assign participants to particular sessions. Your goal is to create an environment that will allow them to speak freely. A common grouping in focus groups is by race and ethnicity. By separating racial and ethnic groups, the discussions will be more likely to capture differences in experiences. However, the nature of your research questions may present other considerations which could “trump” race and ethnicity in deciding how to place parents into focus groups. Depending on your topic, it might make more sense to group participants by such factors as gender, marital status, or age. (See Field Note.)

Field Note

In our special needs project, the pilot focus group session revealed unique and intense sensitivities raised by parents of children with behavioral problems and/or neurological or emotional disabilities. We thought that if we placed parents of children with these disabilities in a group of their own, they might feel more comfortable expressing the particular concerns and emotions they felt in caring for their children. In this project, the nature of the child’s disability seemed a more important consideration than race and ethnicity.

Decisions about how to group participants are critical to the quality and richness of your results. Take the time to make as careful a judgment as you can and use your pilot session to test your decisions. Of course, the pace and robustness of your recruitment effort will affect these choices as well. A large pool of eligible parents allows you more options—the ideal situation from a researcher’s standpoint. However, if your recruitment is slow and your pool of eligible parents very small, how you group the parents will be the least of your worries! You may have no choice but to simply fill the sessions with eligible parents as you screen them.

CAUTION

If your pool of eligible parents is large enough, it is always best to schedule at least two focus groups of any one subpopulation, or in any one community, to avoid your results being skewed by one aberrant session.

What information should you provide when inviting the parents?

Once you have selected the participants, call and invite them to attend. Remember to:

• Provide the date, time, and location of the focus group session.
• Ask parents if they will need transportation and/or child care.
• If they request child care, ask if any special accommodations are needed for their child.
• Remind them that refreshments will be provided.
• Remind them that they will be paid a cash stipend for participating.
• Tell them you will follow up with a reminder call a day or two before the date. You might want to call parents one more time on the morning of the focus group session.
• Thank the parents for their important contribution to your project; tell them you look forward to hearing about their experiences.

For the parents who accept, prepare a list of their names and contact information to provide to staff at the sessions.

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