Recruitment and Interview Update

Within the last week, I have successfully recruited 5 participants, and I've already completed interviewing the third participant.  I still need to interview the first 2 one more time.  I haven't started interviewing the last 2 yet, one of which will be on vacation for the next 3 weeks.  I believe one reason that I'm having a hard time recruiting people is that many of my participants are on vacation or have left the country for good.  July is the month of transition for my target participant population.  Once they are settled back home or back for the fall semester, then I should be able to recruit and interview more.  However, I may not need to do this as I seem to have a sufficient number of participants now.  That being said, some of them may not complete their interviews.

I plan to contact 5 more participants for recruitment within the next week.  I also plan to send reminders to about 5 others that I attempted to recruit a month ago.  The last time I sent out reminders, I successfully recruited one.  If my current 5 participants all complete the interviews within the month, then I am done collecting data.  However, if they do not, then I will plan another phase of recruitment.

One of the biggest changes since my last post was that I decided not to recruit through Twitter as my pilot test failed.  Apparently, a recruitment message can get lost in the Twitter feed very quickly and/or go unnoticed in the contact section for months.  Twitter is also too risky to recruit privately.  Instead I've decided to use YouTube which notifies its users well.  Although the pilot test worked, none of my contacts through YouTube have replied yet.

With regular email recruitment, I've found that most of my respondents reply within 24 hours of my message being sent.  Only one has replied a few days later.  The correspondence with one who declined my invitation spanned nearly 3 weeks!  I was trying to gauge the frequency of blog posting to be roughly equivalent to the frequency they check and/or reply to their email, but I found this to be difficult and usually inaccurate.

As for interviews, nobody has chosen to be interviewed through Adobe Connect, the web conferencing program used at the University of Iowa and Kirkwood Community College.  I'm a bit relieved because that would involve an extra step of transcribing all the interviews.  However, I'm finding that some of my participants answer interview questions on a survey platform quite tersely.  One participant insisted that he send his interview answers via online video.  This will be interesting to see one I receive them.