It has been challenging getting students to participate in my focus group, more challenging than I was expecting.
So many of my students have so much going in their lives, global crises, extenuating circumstances outside of their control, lots of university work (I think its easy to forget sometimes that they have multiple units all running at the same time), work commitments, religious commitments, personal lives where they want to see friends and family and do what they enjoy outside of university. My focus group I can imagine doesn’t sit particularly high on that list.
I started out by sending an email to all of the YR2 and FY students on my course – just over 200 hundreds. Outlining my project and my call out for their input. It kind of fell flat on its face. I maybe got 3 people over the course of a week.
I then started to mention it in person to the groups I teach. From this I discovered that many students had no idea I had sent an email at all, it was buried deep in the stream of emails they receive from UAL. Some then explained that they couldn’t do the specific day and time, others just ignored me, but a couple of students then agreed to take part – success!!
As the focus group day loomed, and the participant list was still no where near the 24 target across both groups; I decided to email some of the student reps and get them to send out a message to their individual groups to try and spread the word further – particularly for FY students who I do not teach. Although not particularly successful it did get me another couple of participants.
My last resort was when I was delivering an online session to all of YR2 about Tech Packs (a subject directly linked to my research), so did a call out at the end of the presentation. This was probably the most successful method and I had about 4 students email me afterwards to say they would take part.
From this experience I have realised that you can’t send an email, sit back and relax, and expect a flood of participants to be chomping at the bit to take part. You have to try different methods and be proactive. In total I now have 11 participants across both focus groups. 4 in one and 7 in the other, which just about gets me to my minimum target! I retrospectively did some research once I realised how challenging it was and one research paper succinctly put…
‘A flexible multi-modal recruitment plan, including both active and passive strategies, was advantageous.’ (Negrin et.al 2022)
It was good to know that this is what I had been doing, and for any future research I will be more prepared in enacting a flexible multi-modal recruitment plan!
In comparison it’s interesting to see how differently it can work when the participants are staff and not students. A peer on the PgCert who works within my course team, emailed out to ask if the rest of the staff on the course would be willing to take part in their ARP activity and by the end of the day almost all of the staff had responded agreeing to take part, or passing on their apologies because they had prior commitments.
Perhaps its because many of the staff have done PgCerts before and know that its never an easy task to get participants, so are willing to help. I know I jumped at the chance to take part not only because the activity itself sounds interesting and will benefit my practice, but because I’m in the same boat trying to get participants and it’s not easy, so where I can help out I certainly will! We get on really well as a course team and want to support each other, as you would your friends.
In the same paper by Negrin et.al (2022) they talk about how the researchers ‘ability to establish rapport with potential participants, positively influenced enrollment.’ Perhaps this is why staff are more likely to take part because of an existing rapport with colleagues?
Looking at my participant list, I’ve noticed that a large majority of the students who have agreed to take part are students that I have built more of a rapport with over the past year. The students you have a friendly chat with in class, are frequent attenders and seek out your help outside of scheduled sessions. Perhaps its students that I have helped, that have then seen that I need help, and feel they want to repay the ‘favour’ as it were?
If this is the case, then perhaps there is a bias in the participant pool, even though I tried to recruit in a way that removed my biases. If students that like me as a tutor make up most of the pool, will this have an effect on what they say in the focus group?
References
- Negrin, K. A., Slaughter, S. E., Dahlke, S., & Olson, J. (2022). Successful Recruitment to Qualitative Research: A Critical Reflection. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21.