Wow, after nearly a year of fieldwork, the interviews are coming to a close! July ended quietly on the recruitment front, so I knew I would need to push the recruitment stuff forward in August to attempt to secure 5 or so more women for the final batch of interviews. I started with a simple status on my research Facebook page (just while I went away to think of some other methods) and the response was unprecedented! 3 or 4 young women contacted me within an hour, and I had a total of 7 new contacts within 2 days. This may not sound like a lot, but sometimes I wouldn’t even get 7 contacts in a month, let alone a couple of days! So yes, recruitment obviously can be like buses, nothing for ages, then loads come along at once! So far, 4 of these contacts have been interviewed, and the 25th interview is now booked in for this week. As 25 is the approx. number of interviews I initially stated I would undertake, this could mean that by next week the interview stage of the research is completed (leaving me to try to sort out the pesky focus groups – no comment)! I will need to speak to my supervisors in today’s supervision about whether I should keep trying to recruit for further interviews or not. It’s a tricky one, how do you know when to stop? When and how can you say you have ‘enough’ or ‘sufficient’ data? I feel like I’m still getting loads of rich, new data, and I could keep going… but you have to draw the line somewhere I guess. So this could be the end of an era. Or not. Watch this space!
Tag Archives: interview
First interview done!
On 29/11 I completed my first interview! A real milestone in the project.
I’ve also printed 200 nice shiny flyers, they look great (Emily’s research flyer)!
Also been doing a bit of reading in the last few days and really enjoying engaging with the literature again, I think it can be easy for that side of your work and research to become neglected once you become caught up in the practicalities of recruitment and pilots! But it is nice to get back to, it puts everything back into context and reminds you of why you’re doing the project and what you’re passionate about finding out in the first place. Can be easy to get bogged down in the little details of what colour scheme to use for a flyer so it is nice to have a real reminder of the bigger picture!
September
This month I have been starting to think in more detail about the recruitment process and methodology, exploring different potential avenues for recruitment and trying to figure out the types of populations these routes will target. I’m working on a recruitment timeline, trying to make it more strategic so that I have a more coherent approach to the project and can deploy different strategies at different times (thinking, for example, about university term dates and holidays, specific events etc). Some of the early issues I have encountered have been that I have been suggesting a sort of ‘hands-off’ approach, when I need to look in more detail at some of the more face-to-face mechanisms I can utilise. I know I am focusing quite heavily on the use of a dedicated account on Facebook, however I really can see the potential value in this. So many of my target demographic use Facebook that I think it would be a mistake to overlook it, plus it offers a way for me to proactively target different night out pages and events, many of which have over 10,000 subscribers. This makes Facebook a free and low-effort way to reach a huge target population, plus it can be used as an ongoing process (e.g. targeting pages for upcoming events) rather than a one-off, meaning I can be flexible and responsive in how it is used, for example depending on which populations I need to target.
Alongside this, I need to ensure my research documentation (consent forms, information sheets, flyers and posters) are up to date and ready to go when the study is launched (hopefully at the start of November).
And of course, the interview and focus group schedules are constantly being developed and fine-tuned in the background. Obviously I don’t want to start trying to recruit if I am still some way off actually starting the research, as potential participants are more likely to lose interest. On the other hand however, I will need to balance this with ‘putting the feelers out’ for recruitment sufficiently early as there may be some time lag in securing participants.