Question

Describe where you might recruit participants for a qualitiative study and how you would obtain site permission, noting any challenges you may encounter?

Answer 1

Finding the right people in a timely manner is crucial for the success of a qualitative study or research, but the question here is that where and how to start?

Well for this we should understand that the best time for recruitment of participants in a qualitative research is shortly after deciding the subject on which we want to do research. After having built a basic understanding of our topic, we move on to recruiting participants. Then we have to decide about the number of participants to be recruited. In fact, it is the important factor for success of the qualitative research. It has been observed that for qualitative studies, be it interviews, usability tests, heuristic evaluations or the like, five participants are enough to gain a first grasp of the bigger picture or to find most usability problems a system suffers. More do not necessarily mean better results or additional insights.

While we actually start recruiting participants, there ae two ways of doing so. One is recruiting participants from recruiting agencies and /or recruiting on our own. But it is always advisable to have own participants database .It is also important to not that it is always better leveraging our personal and professional networks while recruiting participants. We can also take referrals from our study group participants.