But there may be workarounds: instead of conducting the entire survey online, hang out in the student center and do some old fashioned face-to-face surveying. I decided to visit the classes my participant pool was selected from, and with instructor permission gave a short, awkward speech about me, my research interests, and the study in general.ĭepending on your research and IRB regulations, you may have less flexibility in meeting students or soliciting face-to-face. I was asking students to give up their valuable time and privacy to a stranger, and shouldn’t have been surprised that only one student volunteered from solicitation emails alone. The first step in convincing students to work with me was letting them see me as a person. Throughout the process of begging, pleading, crying, and working within the constraints of Institutional Review Board (IRB) regulations, I have discovered a list of things I wish I knew about recruiting research participants:
I enthusiastically wrote an email and survey soliciting study participants, triumphantly clicked send, and sat back and waited for the volunteers to roll in.įast forward four weeks to find me increasingly desperate in my search for research participants, discovering to my dismay (and rising blood pressure) that persuading students to be my guinea pigs for a semester is only slightly less challenging than persuading my cat to ride a bicycle. As a newly minted Ph.D candidate, I couldn’t wait to start my dissertation research. You can follow her on twitter semester started off so well. This is a guest post by Stephanie Hedge, a PhD Candidate at Ball State University in Rhetoric and Composition.
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