Challenges in recruitment of research participants

Maxine Patel is a Medical Research Council Special Training Fellow (Health Services Research) at the Institute of Psychiatry and GKT School of Medicine (Division of Psychological Medicine, 103 Denmark Hill, London SE5 8AZ, UK. E-mail: m.patel{at}iop.kcl.ac.uk) and an honorary specialist registrar in psychiatry. Her research interests include patient and staff attitudes to medication used in psychoses, as well as insight and treatment adherence in psychoses, mood disorders and depersonalisation. She has received funding through an investigator-initiated grant from Janssen-Cilag and consultation fees from the pharmaceutical industry. Victor Doku is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in Tropical Medicine and an honorary specialist registrar in psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry. His research interests include the epidemiology of psychoses in Africans, ethnopsychopharmacology of Africans and pragmatic clinical trials in developing countries. Victor Doku has worked as a sub-investigator on international trials on first-episode psychosis sponsored by Eli Lilly and Janssen-Cilag. Lakshika Tennakoon is a research scientist at the Mental Health Centre of Boulder County, Boulder CA, USA. She has previously worked at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her research interests include family caregivers in schizophrenia and cancer populations and epidemiological aspects of schizophrenia and other chronic disorders.

There are many potential pitfalls in the identification and enlistment of suitable candidates for psychiatric research. The challenges of recruitment are highlighted, detailing impact of study design, characteristics of participants, including demographics and personal preferences, investigator characteristics and collaboration with clinicians. Techniques used in recruitment are discussed, including financial incentives, assertive tracking and communication methods. Ethical issues, methods of data collection, and control participants are also considered. Key issues are: early consideration of the impact of study design on the recruitment process; the participant’s perspective; close collaboration with colleagues; the investigator’s good interpersonal, communication and organisational skills; and feedback to collaborators, associated clinicians and participants.