Selecting, Recruiting, Retaining and Releasing Participants

Abstract

The relationship with research subjects must be carefully managed and controlled at each stage of the research process. This means thinking about how subjects are chosen and encouraged to join a research project, how they are encouraged to remain in the project for the duration and how their withdrawal from a project is facilitated. The key questions include the equitable selection of subjects, resisting placing undue pressure on them to join and, equally, avoiding undue pressure in discouraging them from leaving. Awareness of systematic inclusion and exclusion of specific socio-demographic categories for reasons that are not linked to research design must be maintained and such systematic distortions avoided. The designed research focus may allow for the exclusion of certain categories of respondent — if so this must be achieved in as open and transparent a manner as possible. There may be explicit benefits accruing from being included in a research project, and these should be made clear at the outset — just as warning about disbenefits is essential.