Remote Research Hinders Recruitment of a Diverse Sample.

Abstract

Remote Research Hinders Recruitment of a Diverse Sample Beth Prusaczyk Funding. This work was funded by the Institute for Public Health, Washington University in St. Louis When the pandemic began, many researchers sought to capture the historical event from the perspectives of different groups of people. As someone who conducts research related to older adults, I knew the pandemic was a matter of life and death for them. Along with my colleagues, I wanted to understand the pandemic's impact on older adults from a "whole-person" perspective. We wanted to know how older adults' health and mental health were affected and what they saw as the positives to come out of the pandemic, and how the pandemic fit within the other events in their lives or lifetime. Therefore, we began a study for this purpose and designed it, knowing it would have to be conducted during the pandemic. We did not have to transition a pre-existing study into this new environment and were able to plan for an entirely remote operation. For their part, the IRB reviewed and approved the study quickly, though we purposefully chose not to collect Protected Health Information (PHI) so that our study would not have some of the required restrictions and protocols necessary when collecting PHI. We had conducted studies online or over the phone before, but we were still not prepared for some of the challenges we faced. From the beginning, we decided to make a concerted effort to recruit older adults who were low-income, Black or African-American, or identified as LGBTQ. We wanted to ensure our sample did not represent only more privileged older adults who were likely to navigate (and literally survive) the pandemic better than these other groups. However, our intentions to recruit a diverse sample were met with significant logistical challenges as we attempted to conduct a fully remote study during the pandemic. First, we knew we would be using an online survey since there was no way we could have in-person study visits at this time. An online survey would be the easiest and most efficient way to reach a large number of older adults. Second, we also wanted to compensate our participants for their time but what would normally be trivial tasks for an academic research shop—the purchasing of gift cards, printing letters, addressing and stamping envelopes, and putting them in the bulk mail—became impossible in the pandemic. Therefore, we decided we would send e-gift cards to the participants' email addresses. However, both the online survey and e-gift cards would require the older adult to have Internet access, have the proficiency to navigate the online survey, and use email; things not every older adult may have, especially those who are low-income. Fully virtual/remote research, whether done out of convenience or necessity, brings with it a significant cost to recruiting and enrolling diverse populations who are often excluded from research to begin with. [End Page 37] For participants who did not wish to take the survey online, we offered them the option to complete the survey over the phone with a research assistant. However, again in normal times, the research assistant would call from their desk phone at the university and leave that call-back number on the person's voicemail. Now, our research assistants were all working from home, all over the country, with phone numbers representing those different areas. Many participants would not answer calls from numbers they did not recognize or that were outside of the area. Furthermore, we did not want the research assistants to have to expose their personal cell phone numbers for the study, but if they blocked their number when making calls, participants would understandably not answer a blocked number either. If the call went to voice-mail, we had the research assistants leave my office number as the call-back number. Of course, I was also working from home and was then having to regularly check my voicemail and try to quickly relay returned calls to the research assistants so they could try the participant again. It wasn't until very late in the study that we set up the...