One important lesson from our research so far is that compensation can be a double edged sword— while it helps generate interest, it can also attract participants who do not fit the criteria impersonating someone who does. To mitigate this, it is crucial to implement fraud, scam and bot protection measures, especially when using online forms. This includes detecting duplicate responses, enabling CAPTCHA and screening by location. Additionally, requiring cameras to be on during virtual sessions can further ensure participant authenticity. Most importantly, building connections and using existing trusted networks for recruitment serves as the best method and has yielded our best results.
In addition, we learned that from the beginning it is important to generalize recruitment measures to a variety of avenues to ensure a mixture of participants. Early on within our recruitment process we hit road blocks with recruitment, which included but not limited to: an addition IRB review to allow us to hang posters on the wall of establishments outside of libraries and YMCA's.
These two situations that we had to go through hampered our recruitment efforts in the beginning. However, once we got everything sorted out with recruitment it allowed us to drive full steam ahead on obtaining the necessary mix of teachers, parents, and students needed for our study.
Currently we are at the later half of recruitment. Around 38 interviews have been conducted so far, which is very close to the 45 participants we plan to recruit. In addition to this, we have been able to recruit participants from a variety of sources around Southwest Ohio. However, bots and people impersonating others are still a factor we still have to deal with during recruitment. This is one downside when using Facebook while recruiting participants for interviews that can be done virtually, but there are upsides to using Facebook too. One upside to our Facebook recruitment was that, it allowed for and additional point of contact for potential participants within the study without having to drive to their geographical location to hang up flyers. This allowed for more time to be spent conducting interviews and then transcribing them to be reviewed later.
Following our data collection, we will begin our qualitative analysis portion of our study. We will use both deductive and inductive approaches: responses will be coded to align with the five core SECs of the CASEL framework and thematic analysis will be used to identify any new, overarching themes that may extend beyond the existing SECs. To ensure intercoder reliability, multiple RAs will independently code the data and communicate any discrepancies to reach a consensus.