Evaluating the Efficiency of Methods to Recruit Asian Research Participants

Few empirical studies have evaluated the efficiency of recruitment methods to recruit non- English-speaking research participants. We attempt to fill this research gap by conducting a systematic evaluation using recruitment data from a large cognitive testing study that pretested the translations of the American Community Survey. In our study we contacted 1,084 Chinese and Korean speakers to identify those who spoke little or no English. We measured the efficiency of the recruitment methods (newspaper advertisements, flyers, online communication, and word of mouth) using four criteria: time spent, outreach capacity, screener completion, and eligibility rate. We also examined differences in recruitment efficiencies by recruiters and sublanguage groups. Among the recruitment methods examined, newspaper advertisements were most efficient in reaching a larger number of Asians while using the least amount of recruiters’ time. For recruiting non-English speakers, word of mouth by recruiters with strong ties to the ethnic community worked best.