Participant recruitment¶
Current efforts & past results¶
The Recruitment Working Group is actively exploring and testing out recruitment approaches!
See this Google doc for recent observations about approaches and success.
Here are some general observations:
- Substantial carryover effects to other studies (in different age range) when one group advertises a study! We’re getting benefits of cooperation, and really not seeing “competition” between Lookit studies at this point.
- Paying participants makes a huge difference in ability to recruit, as well as diversity of participants. Separately, we believe it’s ethical to pay families for their time & contribution. We currently aim for ~$15/hour for the expected duration of the study. Currently done by researchers manually sending gift cards post-study; eventual plans to provide centralized compensation functionality.
Existing avenues for online outreach:¶
- Facebook page
- Posting to AcademicMamas w/ babies born 2017 page (and tagging specific moms with kids in age range) has had the most success (but still very small-scale - a total of maybe 10 kids)
- Occasional attempts at ‘boosting’ posts advertising studies (most recently, ~6000 views from new parents) has never yielded participants for unpaid studies
- Interested labs may advertise via the Lookit page - we send an invite to be an editor, you may need to double check at https://www.facebook.com/pages/?category=invites to find it. There are known problems about the invites being hard to find: https://www.facebook.com/business/help/community/question/?id=1249301125083191
- Experimenting with interest targeting and recording results would be a helpful contribution!
Potential approaches:¶
- Ask participants to tell their friends
- Include in study debriefing
- Provide video for download/sharing
- Email after study
- Provide printable flyers on website
- Option to become a parent ambassador/advisor, or just be more available to parents
- Advance testing of new studies
- Providing more detailed feedback on studies & parent-facing text
- Occasional joint meetings, or involvement in other Lookit meetings
- Share with parent groups online
- “Office hours” - easy to join group video chat
- Schedule participants (even though it’s unnecessary) to provide “accountability” when people intend to participate
- Cultivate a more active social media presence
- Regularly posted content - e.g.
- Info about cognitive development or recent studies, interesting articles
- Cute videos of participants
- Status updates
- Intros to lab members
- Q&A about cognitive development
- Encourage sharing cute pictures/videos on particular topics
- “Ask your kid” feature - get funny answers to questions
- Read about how to do this and/or get help from people who know what they’re doing
- Regularly posted content - e.g.
- In-person local advertising (see Rianna’s Cambridge/Boston map).
Put up flyers and/or talk to local institutions/people that work with
kids to get them excited about Lookit, ask them to mention it to
families, maintain relationships. Examples of places we’ve looked when advertising
locally in Cambridge:
- Look at lists like Boston Coop, Mommy Poppins drop-in indoor playspaces, City Moms Blog to gather more ideas
- Activities: Cambridge Public Library lapsit, other activities like Music Together
- Parent groups: look for new parent support groups, new parent education, baby playgroups.
- Toy stores; Baby stuff secondhand shops, e.g. Two Little Monkeys
- Pediatricians’ offices
- Parks
- Daycares, preschools, elementary schools, afterschool programs
- MIT museum (not because they get a ton of kids but because we already have a connection via MIT, and in the future maybe they’d like to host an interactive Lookit display…)
- Cambridge Family Resource Center
- Baby U, Center for Families playgroups, other parent ed
- Go to events with kids and talk with families directly
- Cambridge Science Festival
- Keep an eye out on various calendars for events (e.g., Cambridge DHSP)
- Boston Children’s Museum
- Possible features to support recruitment
- Point system
- Let parents comment on studies publicly?
- Media/online outreach
- Talk to groups that do online research with adults (e.g. LabInTheWild, TestMyBrain) to see if they’d be up for linking to Lookit
- Talk to groups that do online research with kids - e.g. https://www.babysleepstudy.org/studysignup,
- Ask institutions that might be interested about featuring/linking to Lookit, or publishing content we provide - examples:
- Boston Children’s Museum
- https://www.parentingscience.com/online-parenting-studies.html
- http://www.scholastic.com/parents/blogs
- https://www.sciencedaily.com/news/mind_brain/child_psychology/
- https://theconversation.com/us (write an article?)
- http://www.parenting.com/
- https://www.babycenter.com/
- https://mommypoppins.com/kids/drop-in-indoor-play-spaces-for-boston-babies-toddlers-and-preschoolers (can request listing)
- https://boston.citymomsblog.com/guide/8-rainy-day-infant-toddler-friendly-activities-in-boston/ (guest post submission)
- Work w/ parenting-focused bloggers (esp. who don’t focus exclusively on paid review type posts)
- Ask for help from MIT media folks
- Posting in parent groups - BabyCenter, Facebook birth clubs, etc.
- Better organize efforts across labs
- Piggyback on local efforts to send out mailings
- Actual advertising - e.g. Facebook, Google AdWords, magazine or public transit ad space