Abstract
BackgroundEffective strategies for contacting and recruiting study participants are critical in conducting clinical research. In this study, we conducted two sequential randomized controlled trials of mail- and telephone-based strategies for contacting and recruiting participants, and evaluated participant-related variables’ association with time to survey completion and survey completion rates. Subjects eligible for this study were survivors of acute lung injury who had been previously enrolled in a 12-month observational follow-up study evaluating their physical, cognitive and mental health outcomes, with their last study visit completed at a median of 34 months previously.MethodsEligible subjects were contacted to complete a new research survey as part of two randomized trials, initially using a randomized mail-based contact strategy, followed by a randomized telephone-based contact strategy for non-responders to the mail strategy. Both strategies focused on using either a personalized versus a generic approach. In addition, 18 potentially relevant subject-related variables (e.g., demographics, last known physical and mental health status) were evaluated for association with time to survey completion.ResultsOf 308 eligible subjects, 67% completed the survey with a median (IQR) of 3 (2, 5) contact attempts required. There was no significant difference in the time to survey completion for either randomized trial of mail- or phone-based contact strategy. Among all subject-related variables, age ≤40 years and minority race were independently associated with a longer time to survey completion.ConclusionWe found that age ≤40 years and minority race were associated with a longer time to survey completion, but personalized versus generic approaches to mail- and telephone-based contact strategies had no significant effect. Repeating both mail and telephone contact attempts was important for increasing survey completion rate.Trial registrationNCT00719446.
Highlights
Effective strategies for contacting and recruiting study participants are critical in conducting clinical research
Building on the results of Chen et al [13], in the current study, we evaluated a similar population of acute lung injury (ALI) survivors, but with a larger sample size of 332 participants, recruited from 41 hospital sites at 12 centers across the U.S Like Chen et al, this trial was conducted with participants who had previously been enrolled in an observational follow-up study evaluating physical and mental health outcomes
For the telephone portion of the trial (Figure 2), 171 eligible subjects who did not respond to the mail trial or had no valid mailing address were contacted by telephone, of which 86 (50%) were in the generic “ARDSNetwork Long Term Outcomes Study (ALTOS) study” telephone message group and 85 (50%) in personalized “ALTOS principal investigator” message group
Summary
Effective strategies for contacting and recruiting study participants are critical in conducting clinical research. We conducted two sequential randomized controlled trials of mail- and telephone-based strategies for contacting and recruiting participants, and evaluated participant-related variables’ association with time to survey completion and survey completion rates. Several studies have shown that participants who were female, Caucasian, younger, more educated, and employed tend to have faster response to surveys [5,6,7,8,9] These findings are not universally confirmed, with conflicting results regarding factors, such as participant demographics and health status, influencing participant recruitment and contact [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. Chen et al [13] studied 146 acute lung injury (ALI) survivors from a single-center, multi-site longitudinal observational study based in the U.S
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