Chapter 3: Finding Participants

Once you’ve started your research project, planned the logistics of how you will run your fieldwork, and decided on your approach to your analysis and outputs, you need to find your participants: the people who you’ll be interviewing, observing, or asking to try your product.

The process of finding participants is called ‘recruitment’, and it’s the number one cause of headaches in research projects! You can encounter problems at several stages of the recruitment process – during set-up, while recruiting, and even on the day. Participants can be difficult to find, and even harder to convince to give you some of their time. Because of this, it can be tempting to cut corners, but if your recruitment is flawed, then everything else that follows in your research project will be flawed, too.

You should start planning your recruitment during the kickoff phase of the research cycle (see Chapter 1). From the activities you do here, such as stakeholder interviews and your desk research, you will have started to form a good picture of who you need to talk to.

The research cycle: setup

Who To Recruit

Begin by defining your sample: the small group of people who’ll be giving you insights into your audience’s needs and behaviour. We talked about the concept of a sample in Chapter 2. Now that we’re getting into the practicalities, you need to be aware that your choice of sample design has to take into account both validity and achievability.

Validity is about ensuring that the people in your research are a good reflection of what your users or customers actually do in real life. When we do research, we’re engaging with a small group of people: the sample. We do this in order to draw conclusions about a much larger group: the ‘population’. For example, we might talk to 10 Shoestore customers in order to draw conclusions about the needs of all Shoestore customers. This principle only works if your sample is truly representative of the population. If not, your conclusions won’t be valid.

Achievability is how realistic it is that you can find and recruit participants who are the best fit for your research. You will have to consider how likely it is that you can contact them, and how willing they will be to take part. Also, will the incentive that you are offering be appealing enough to them?

In practice, you’ll usually have to strike a balance between the two. Say, for example, you wanted to understand astronauts’ use of social media when in space.

• You would probably struggle to find people who meet the criteria. It would be difficult to achieve, and you may have to slightly relax the definition – for example, by including trainee astronauts, rather than solely those who have been in space.
• On the other hand, you wouldn’t just want to include your friends and family, because their feedback would be of little value to the question: it wouldn’t be valid.

You need to be fussy about who you include, without being a perfectionist.

Defining Your Sample

In the kickoff workshop, you’ll have done some initial talking about who to include, but your ideas will probably need a bit more work before you’re ready to use them for recruitment. Also, it’s beneficial to have time to do some desk research and stakeholder interviews, and to reflect on the practicalities of recruitment (ie, the achievability aspect) before you commit.

To define the sample, we find it helpful to run a prioritization exercise with the project team and stakeholders:

• Take a piece of flipchart paper or a whiteboard, and divide it into four columns. Title the first column ‘Primary Variables’, the middle column ‘Secondary Variables’, and the final column ‘Nice-to-Have’.
• Now, ask the team to propose variables, and add them to Post-It notes. Examples might be things like ‘Device ownership’, ‘Recent shoe-buying behaviour’, ‘Customer/non-customer’, or ‘Age’. You’re going to sort these into columns in a minute, but at this stage just put them into an unsorted grouping on the wall.
• Now, facilitate the group as they allocate the Post-It notes to the three columns you’ve created. The rules are: no more than two Post-Its in the Primary column, and no more than seven in the Secondary column. The rest go either into the Nice-to-Have column, or the group agrees to discard them totally.
• Once you’ve prioritised your variables, you’ll need to define them in a bit more detail. For example, what do you mean by a ‘customer’? Someone who’s ever shopped in Shoestore? Someone who’s shopped there in the past six months? Someone who makes an active decision to shop there? Someone who shops on the website, rather than in-store?
• In many cases, you’ll also need to define values. If you’ve decided that age is important, you’ll need to define age bands.

Sample planning session

Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to define your sample. We do this in a document called a ‘recruitment brief’.

Creating a Recruitment Brief

A recruitment brief is a document specifying the details you need to complete recruitment successfully. It contains:

• The sample definition. Here, you’ll list the variables, definitions and values you created in the exercise above as recruitment criteria.
• The logistics. Dates, times and locations of research sessions.
• Details of the incentive payment for participants.
• If you’re planning to outsource the recruitment, then some background on the project is also helpful. Offering insight into why you’re asking for the type of people you’re looking for can give more of a steer, if a potential participant doesn’t neatly fit into any of your groups.

However, you’re planning to tackle your recruitment, writing a brief is a good idea. If you’re taking a DIY approach, it’s a helpful document for you to refer back to when you’re considering participants for your research, especially if there are several of you working on it. If you’re outsourcing the recruitment to a supplier, it’s even more important. You won’t always be there to explain anything that is slightly ambiguous or wrong, so you have to be as clear as possible.

You can see an example recruitment brief below:

Example recruitment brief

Defining Criteria

Earlier, we mentioned that it’s a good idea to have no more than two primary variables. Here’s why: you want these variables to work as a quota matrix (to ‘interlock’, in the jargon). If you have more than two variables in your matrix, it starts to get complicated.

Example primary variables

Note that we’ve specified how many participants to recruit within each cell, and the total for each row and column. It can sometimes be helpful to make this a little more flexible, eg, ‘1-3 participants’ rather than ‘2 participants’.

Once you’ve dealt with your primary variables, you’ll need to specify your other criteria. You can do this in several ways:

• Screening criteria are used to exclude people who wouldn’t be suitable. For example, you should avoid anyone who works in design, as they wouldn’t be representative of ‘normal’ customers.
• Quotas are used to produce a good mix of participants, or to ensure that you don’t get too many or too few of one kind. For example, you might want to include quotas on device ownership, or require that at least two of your participants already have accounts with Shoestore.
• Information capture should be used sparingly. You definitely need contact details, and it may be helpful to know a little bit more about your participants (for example, their occupation) to get the conversation started. Other than that, save your questions for the session!

Here are some tips to help you get it right:

• Limit the number of expert users of your product/service. It is important to talk to expert users as well as novices, but you also want to make sure you have a good spread.
• Consider the level of web experience your participants have, and how important this is to your research.
• Screen out people that have done too much research, especially in the last six months.
• Ask yourself whether you should be including people with specific accessibility requirements.

Getting The Right People

Once you’ve decided who you want to include in the research, and defined it in a recruitment brief, you’ll need a way to ensure that you’re actually getting those people. There are two ways to do this.

• Evaluating against the recruitment brief: Once you’ve identified a potential participant, you just size them up against the criteria in the recruitment brief, based on what you know about them or an informal conversation. This is the rough-and-ready method, and is most commonly used in DIY recruitment (see later in this chapter).
• Using a screener: Once a potential participant has been identified, they’re asked a series of questions that evaluates them against the criteria in the recruitment brief, and allocates them to a quota. This is the more robust, credible approach, as used by recruitment agencies.

There are pros and cons to both approaches. Evaluating against the recruitment brief can be inaccurate, risking misleading results and undermining the credibility of your project. On the other hand, a screener takes additional time to create and apply.

There are some workarounds. If you hire a recruitment agency, they will often write the screener on your behalf. If you’re conducting guerrilla research, the screener will be very short. We’ll say more about both of these scenarios later in the chapter.

Creating a Screener

A screener is a set of questions that are asked to potential participants, based on the sample criteria you defined in your recruitment brief. These questions are designed to figure out how suitable participants are for your project.

You can see an example screener here, showing the key questions you would want to ask to recruit for a project about outdoor gear. It establishes what activities the potential participants do without leading them to give certain answers. The other questions are written to probe more into their experiences and habits when buying outdoor equipment, without being leading. The final question is written to catch out anyone that is trying to trick their way onto the research.

Example screener

Screener questions contain several elements:

• A question number.
• The question itself – This should be phrased as it would be read, even though in practice you should expect a little flexibility in the way a recruiter reads out the text you’ve written.
• Instructions to the recruiter. These won’t be read out, but give guidance on how to ask the question and how to classify the response. Common instructions include ‘Read out all options’, ‘Don’t read out options’, ‘Tick one’, ‘Tick all that apply’.
• A response area: normally multiple choice options, or an empty box for writing in. For each, there should be an instruction on what to do if it’s ticked, eg, ‘Thank and close’ (ie, reject the candidate and end the screener), ‘Recruit to quota’, or just ‘Continue’.

As you can see, screeners have a certain amount of jargon attached to them, but you shouldn’t worry about this. If you’re doing your own recruitment, you just need to make it clear to yourself, while if you’re using a recruiter, they will be able to interpret your instructions once you’ve talked them through it.

Some tips for creating a good screener:

• Use precise language. For example, rather than asking ,”How many times have you been to the cinema recently?”, a better question would be: ‘How many times have you been to the cinema in the past 30 days?”
• Try to make your questions as factual as possible, so participants aren’t tempted to exaggerate or misrepresent their behaviour. For example, if you want to know how frequently someone exercises, don’t ask them, “How many times do you exercise a week?” People will tend to exaggerate because they don’t want to look bad! A better question would be: “Which of the following have you done in the past week: running, cycling, gym, cinema, reading, etc.”
• Try to make your questions easy to answer. In particular, it can be hard to remember events that took place a long time ago. You can prompt with options, as in the example above, but make sure you disguise the answer you’re interested in among other choices.
• Make sure your questions are essential to selecting the best participants. The more questions you add, the more time consuming it is for you and the people you are screening.
• The ideal order to sequence your questions is to cover screening criteria first, then primary quotas, then secondary quotas, and finally information capture for contact details.
• In most cases, it’s a good idea to conceal the purpose of the research and the organisation you’re working for. The participant will probably guess to some extent, based on the questions you’re asking, but try to keep the details hidden. Otherwise, they may be tempted to do some prior reading up before attending the research session.
• Finally, try to focus on and categorise people based on behaviour if you can. If not, ask about attitudes. Demographics are least useful of all.

It’s also important that you give potential participants some briefing information about the session during the screening process. For example:

• Telling them they’ll be asked to use a website or app.
• Reminding them to bring their glasses, if they need to.
• Asking them to bring a form of photo identification.
• Confirming the incentive and how it will be paid.
• Making sure they’ve got a contact number in case of any problems finding the venue or last-minute cancellations. Giving this information ensures that participants are making an informed decision about whether to participate, and there are no nasty surprises on the day.

Different Kinds of Screeners

Screeners vary in length and complexity. A typical screener for a depth interview or user test is around 10 - 30 questions long. This allows you to capture one or two primary variables, up to 7 secondary variables, plus capture contact details. Any longer than this, and you’ll find that candidates lose interest.

If you’re conducting guerrilla research, your time is extremely limited. You’ll want to get screening over with as quickly as possible, which means five questions in total is plenty. Incidentally, that’s about as much as you can fit onto a single side of paper on a clipboard, so there are practical reasons for keeping it short, too.

Finally, you may choose to run your screener as an online survey, and have candidates complete it themselves rather than talk them through it. If you take this approach, it’s important to:

• Put even more thought into the phrasing of your questions.
• Keep it short – no more than two or three minutes.
• Pilot test your questionnaire with at least three people before you launch it. On the plus side, this is a great way to save time, especially if you’re sourcing people online from websites like Gumtree or Facebook.

Methods of Accessing People

Let’s talk more about locating people for your fieldwork. There are four main methods of recruitment:

1. Recruitment agencies
2. Guerrilla
3. DIY
4. Gatekeepers

1. Recruitment Agencies

Recruitment agencies are almost always the best option for recruitment. Professional recruiters will find you high-quality participants, and will be able to give you advice and guidance along the way.

A recruitment agency will normally charge a per-person fee for each participant they find and book in for you. This cost will vary depending on the recruit, and the recruitment fee will increase the harder your recruitment criteria are. If you’re looking for a very specific and niche audience, the fee will increase. This can seem like a big cost up front but it’s actually an incredibly cost-efficient approach, compared with finding people yourself.

Usually, recruiters like to have at least two weeks’ notice before you are doing your interviews, to give them enough time to find the people you need. If you are looking for a particularly niche audience, you may need to allow even more time.

Appointing a Recruitment Agency

Developing a good relationship with a decent recruitment agency is incredibly valuable and will make your life much easier when it comes to research. But it takes time, and it may take some trial and error. You will want to consider the area of expertise the recruiter has and how relevant that is to your audience. You will also want to check that they are insured and reliable.

There are a range of other less tangible qualities that we have found are important in the recruitment agencies we work with:

• Good communication We’ve found that the highest-quality participants come from recruiters who keep in touch, and openly communicate while they are finding people for you. They may allow you to double-check the details of potential participants before confirming and booking them in. This helps prevent any misinterpretation of the recruitment brief or a mis-recruit. This works both ways – if you have any problems and changes come up midway through the project that will impact recruitment, be sure to let your recruiter know as soon as possible.
• Honest It’s important that your recruiter is honest with you, and that you can be honest with them. Having difficult conversations early on and throughout the recruitment can be tough but is also important, especially on hard recruits. If they are struggling to find who you need, you want to know that they will tell you as soon as possible. That gives you time to figure out a solution well in advance of testing. If you’re asking for an impossible recruit, you want a recruitment agency who aren’t afraid to tell you that you’re being unrealistic. You also need to feel that you are able to give them open and honest feedback. If the people they are suggesting to recruit are not quite right, you need to be able to have these conversations to avoid poor quality participants.
• Transparent A good recruiter will be open with you about their methods and processes. They will explain how and where they will be advertising and looking for participants. They will share documents early and often throughout the recruitment process. This is important because it gives you insight into how the recruit is going and how they are working. It’s also useful for when other people in your project team ask you how recruitment is going.
• Have a range of recruitment methods Good recruiters will have a decent tool kit and lots of ideas about how they will try and recruit the people you need. They may have their usual methods, such as a database, but they will have ideas about what to do if the recruit gets tricky or if you are after a niche group of people.
• Low no-show rate You need to know how a recruiter will handle people not turning up to your sessions. The first thing to know is what their no-show rate is, and you want that to be low. There will be times when people just don’t show up and there is nothing anyone can do about that. Yet in these instances, you need to know how the recruiter will deal with this. They may offer you a refund for that participant. They may offer to re-recruit for that slot at no extra cost. One of the key advantages of using a recruitment agency is that it is not your responsibility to find people for your test slots. So find an agency that’s reliable and can take responsibility for doing the recruitment. And importantly, that the participants they find for you are of high quality.

2. Guerilla Recruitment

Guerrilla testing is research that you do instantly with people you find in cafes, shops, bus stations or wherever is appropriate for the thing you are testing. On these research projects, the research you are doing will need to be quick, immediate and cheap. Where that’s the case, your recruitment will be quick too, because it’s happening on the spot.

We’ve already mentioned that the recruitment brief and screener you use for guerrilla recruitment will be short, compared with the version you use for pre-arranged interviews. You’ll also need to think about where to try and find participants, and how to approach them.

Finding Participants for Guerrilla Testing

You then need to think about where you will find these people. To find people to give feedback on our health app, a good place may be outside a gym. Targeting a health or sports store could also be a good tactic. Make a list of all the places you could potentially go, then plan your route. Keep in mind that you should also ask permission of the owner or manager if you’re testing in spaces such as libraries and cafes.

When you are recruiting in this way, it’s really important to be efficient with your time. If you have a chosen a location and not successfully found someone to talk to within 10-15 minutes, move on. The places you’ve chosen to target should be close together so you can move between them quickly.

It can’t be sugar-coated. Guerrilla recruiting can be really hard work, and a little soul-destroying when people won’t stop to talk to you. It can also be tricky to switch from recruitment mode to interview mode. You can minimise the effect of this and save some energy by working in pairs and swapping roles half way through the day.

Top tips:

• Consider the time of day. If you start early in the morning or late in the evening, people are likely to be in a rush to get to work or to get home. In the middle of the day, you may not get enough people or they may be the wrong kind of people.
• Locations that are good in the morning may not be so good later in the day. One way of checking this is searching for the location (of a cafe you are thinking about going to, for example) on Google. In the summary box about the business you’ll see an indication of the busiest times of day.
• Because of the above two points, try and do your testing during different hours on different days.
• Go to places where people are likely to be having a break or taking some time out.
• People standing outside waiting for trains and buses are easy to approach and are more likely to have a little spare time to help you out.

3. DIY Recruitment

Doing recruitment yourself can be a poor use of resource, and will almost always cost you more than using a recruiter, once you’ve taken your own time into account. It can be really arduous, so we wouldn’t recommend doing it unless really necessary. Yet every now and then, it may happen.

Recruiting this way is really labour intensive and unpredictable. People will be unavailable to talk when you try and contact them, contact details could be out of date, they may be difficult to get hold of and it may take several attempts to talk to each person. Then there is no guarantee that they are quite right to take part, or even willing.

It isn’t all negative though. Recruiting in this way is a good way to build relationships and can be the only way to contact very niche participants.

As with other kinds of recruitment, you’ll need to create a recruitment brief, and it’s a good idea to have a screener too. You’ll also need to spread the word to potential participants. You may want to use social media, advertising on sites such as Gumtree, word of mouth, forums or posters and flyers in suitable locations. Be creative and use as many methods as you can to increase your ability to reach the right audience, much as you would in a marketing campaign. If you’re taking this approach, it can be helpful to set up an online survey as your screener, although bear in mind that personal contact makes candidates more likely to want to take part, so weigh up the effort of screening against the need to get participants on board!

Keep in mind that the sites and locations where you advertise will have an effect on the type of people you get responding to your advert. Gumtree won’t get you lots of high net worth people. Pubs won’t necessarily find you non-drinkers. A good rule of thumb is that if it would be a good place to advertise products to that group, it’s a good place to recruit participants.

4. Gatekeepers

Sometimes a client or someone within your organisation will play the role of a ‘gatekeeper’ to a group of individuals. The gatekeeper will usually have access to a list of potential participants and their contact details.

• If you are working with a business-to-business product or service, this will often be the sales or marketing team, or account managers.
• Customer services are also useful to talk to as they will be on the front line and will have access to users.
• It is also worth asking if any research panels already exist. This is a list of people that have agreed to be contacted to help out with research.

There are two main benefits to this approach. Firstly, the people you’re accessing have already agreed in principle to take part in research, so they may be more open to your approach. Secondly, you may already have some information about them that will help to focus your efforts. For instance, if you’re looking at a customer database, you may have information about whether they’ve purchased in the past six months. If that’s important to you, you could use this information to shortlist people to approach (although you should always confirm the information in the database when you speak to them).

If possible, we’d recommend handing over the list or database to a recruitment agency to contact, screen and schedule. However, there may be data protection implications involved in doing so, so check before you share any information with third parties.

Persuading People to Take Part

Sometimes, people choose to take part in research purely because it’s a subject they care about. Mostly, though, you’ll need to provide them with an incentive of some sort.

In research terms, an ‘incentive’ is a thanks-you – usually monetary – for people’s time. Because of this, it helps to consider: “Is what we are offering fair and sufficient payment for what we are asking them to do, the effort to come along to the research and for the amount of time we are asking them to give us?

For most of our user interviews and depth research, we offer people between £40 and £100 (roughly $50 to $130). The exact amount you will offer your participants will depend on who you are trying to recruit. If you are using a recruitment agency, they will be able to advise on the most suitable incentive for your audience.

For guerrilla interviewing, we tend to offer people a cup of coffee or a voucher for somewhere like Amazon.

Why Offer an Incentive?

For some projects you may simply not have the budget to offer an incentives at all. If this is the case, be aware that not offering an incentive could result in a few things happening:

• It will be harder to recruit.
• The risk of no-shows increases.
• Participants are likely to be extreme fans for the product or service which could bias or skew your findings.
• Or they will be disgruntled customers of the product or service and will have an axe to grind. Sometimes the extreme fans or disgruntled people are great to talk to, but you need to make the decision that they are the type of people you want to talk to.
• It will be likely that a recruitment agency won’t take on your project if you’re not offering an incentive as it makes their job almost impossible.

Some people will need convincing with figures, so here is how much of a monetary hit offering no incentives could be to a project:

• If you pay incentives, you can expect a no-show rate of about 10%. It is easy to adjust for this by over-recruiting, etc. So this could add up to around £200-300 ($260-$400) for 10 user tests.
• If you don’t pay incentives, you can expect a no-show rate of about 50%. This means you have wasted half of the day (staff time + studio hire + the cost of re-recruiting + the cost of running the research again another day, which is normally more inconvenient and therefore more expensive). This could add up to around £1,000-£2,000 ($1,300-$2,600) for 10 user tests, not including the value of the team’s time and the impact on timelines from having to re-recruit (normally an extra 1-2 weeks). You may be on a project where you decide that you cannot take the above risks. You may have a tricky recruit (for example, CEOs) and you need a more moderate spread of participant attitudes, not just the fans or disgruntled customers.

Some companies think their customers will be willing to help them out, or that it’s payment enough to be involved in helping improve a service. Not always! People are busy and have better things to do than take part in your testing. Ouch. But we can make it more appealing by offering them an appropriate incentive. On the other hand, not offering incentives is usually a false economy: any saving will be more than cancelled out by the waste of your team’s valuable time.

Offering an Appropriate Incentive

Offering appealing incentives takes some empathy and understanding for the type of people you are trying to attract.

For example, if you are targeting an audience who are working full-time then the incentive has to be high enough to attract them to leave work for a portion of their day. If you set an incentive that’s too low, the risk of participants not showing up increases dramatically. Too low an incentive will also not attract the ‘best’ participants.

There are some organisations that will not allow you to give your participants cash, and there will be some occasions where it will not be possible or appropriate to offer cash.

• For wealthy people, cash incentives are relatively insignificant and don’t hold much appeal. Instead, you’d be better off making a donation to a charity they’d like to nominate – or at least giving them the option.
• Charity donations are also useful for participants who feel ethically unable to accept an incentive themselves. This often occurs if you’re interviewing people about their work.
• Don’t underestimate the pull of the research experience itself. If you’re having trouble recruiting a certain group, you could offer a taxi to and from the session and a fine buffet when they arrive. The location of your venue – in a prestigious building or part of town – can also play a part.
• Finally, you could get more creative. Offer the latest gadget or a stay in a five-star hotel. We’ve even offered chickens and gold bars in the past!

Arranging Sessions

Now you know who you want to talk to, you need to plan the times and dates that you will be doing your research.

For guerrilla research, this will be straight away. Exactly where you found them! For fieldwork in the lab, home or in workplaces, you will need to book them in.

Running Order

If we are doing hour-long interviews or testing sessions, a typical day might look like this:

• 10.00 - 11.00: Participant 1
• 11.30 - 12.30: Participant 2
• 12.45 - 13.45: Participant 3
• 13.45 - 14.45: Lunch break
• 14.45 - 15.45: Participant 4
• 16.00 - 17.00: Participant 5

Starting at 10am gives you time to troubleshoot in the morning if any problems crop up (see Chapter 6). You will also see that there is a half hour break between Participant 1 and Participant 2. This is so you have time to talk to the team and decide on any amends or tweaks to the discussion guide based on how the first session went.

Later in the day, we allow 15 minutes between sessions. This allows flexibility for people showing up a little late. It also allows you to run over if you’re having a particularly fruitful session. And it gives whoever is moderating the session a breather and a bit of downtime between participants.

Avoiding No-shows

It is difficult to completely eliminate the risk of no-shows, but there are a few things you can do to manage the situation:

• Avoid holidays and weekends. It’s best not to run sessions on Fridays and the days before and around big holidays such as Christmas. People are likely to find the allure of Christmas shopping or the promise of the weekend suddenly more appealing than your research session, unfortunately. Also bear in mind your audience. Big sporting occasions, for example, can also have an effect on some demographics.
• Book a spare participant or over-recruit. Book in an all-day-standby or over-recruit by several participants. An all-day standby is paid to be available throughout so they can fill the slot of anyone who doesn’t turn up. This is particularly valuable if you have senior stakeholders watching your testing. It can feel awkward and look unprofessional if you don’t have a back-up. You also have the option of using this person at the end of the day if you think it would be valuable.
• Include after-office slots. Be mindful of the time of day when scheduling your research. It can be difficult for some people, such as office workers, to take part during office hours, so you may need to include after-hours sessions, too. You may also want to include testing during school holidays – teachers and some parents may free up in the day during these times. This will avoid your recruitment being skewed towards people that are studying, unemployed or self-employed. If you’re using a recruitment agency, they will be able to help and advise you on the best time of day for the people you are trying to attract.
• Confirm the sessions close to day. Contact participants the day before and on the morning of your research to make sure they can still take part and to remind them where to go. It also gives you time to find replacements if there are drop outs. Do this on the phone and text as other methods of communication are too easy to miss or ignore. If you are using a recruitment agency, they will confirm the session with participants for you.

Data Protection

When doing research, you have to remember your obligations under the data protection guidelines and laws in the country in which you’re conducting your research. In the UK, this is the Data Protection Act and the Market Research Society Code of Conduct. In the USA, the American Marketing Association are a good source of guidance. And for general international information on research codes and conduct, see the European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR),

These guidelines outline how you, as a researcher, have a responsibility to look after your participants and their data. It is worth taking the time to read through these guidelines properly.

The key takeaways are that when collecting and using data, you have to make sure the information you collect is:

• Used fairly and lawfully.
• Used for limited and specific purposes, which you have explained to your participants.
• Kept safe and securely.

Informed Consent

As a researcher, you have an ethical duty to make sure that potential participants are able to make an informed decision about whether or not they want to take part in your research. This means you have to make sure your potential participants clearly understand what the research is about, what you expect of them, any consequences of taking part and what you are going to do with their data. This is called ‘informed consent’.

You have to ask participants for their consent to take part in your research before you start collecting any data from them. If you are meeting people face-to-face, you can ask for written consent.

Make it simple for participants by using checkboxes to ensure they understand each part of your consent form. It is not enough for you to hand over a consent form and to expect them to fill it in and understand. You will need to take a few minutes to explain the project to them.

The consent form will then confirm that they have understood what you have told them, which may include:

• That they may be recorded.
• Reassurance that these recordings will not be shared outside of the project team.
• Reassurance that they can withdraw at any point.
• Confirmation that their personal and contact details will not be kept after the testing.
• Reassurance that their data will be stored in accordance with the appropriate data protection guidelines.

Consent When Remote Testing

Sometimes you will be testing participants remotely and they won’t be in the room with you. On these occasions, you have two options. You can email them in advance and get them to sign a digital consent form. Or you can get verbal consent. To get verbal consent, you need to read your consent form to participants and verbally ask them to agree to each checkbox, while recording the conversation.

Testing With Young People

If you need to conduct research with under 18’s, there is a fair amount of legislation and rigour that you need to be aware of before you begin the project. It is worth seeking specific guidance on this well in advance of a project that involves minors.

Keep in mind that you will need to get consent from the child’s parent or guardian. The consent form will be very similar, but with additional wording to allow for the parent or guardian to give consent on behalf of the child.

Summary

• Recruitment is a balance between validity and achievability.
• There are three main methods you can use: a recruitment agency, guerrilla and DIY. Using a recruitment agency is generally the most cost and resource efficient method of finding people.
• Your recruitment brief specifies who you want to include in your research – who, where and when.
• Your screener should make sure you get high-quality participants who fit your criteria.
• Always try to offer an appropriate, compelling incentive. Not offering participants incentives is a massive false economy.
• Make sure you protect your participants and their data according to the guidelines and data protection laws of the country you are collecting and using your data in.