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recruiting is relatively simple. Advertisements and flyers on your college, university,
or corporate bulletin boards (both physical and electronic) can entice users. However,
this must be done carefully: if you wish to get participants with a wide range of ages
and education by recruiting on a university campus, you should be careful to explic-
itly recruit faculty and staff, as well as students. Notices in local newspapers and on
community-oriented websites can be useful for recruiting an even broader group of
participants.
More specific requirements are likely to require more focused recruiting efforts.
Increased specificity in advertisements is a starting point: you might specifically
indicate that you are looking for female college students. Community groups, profes-
sional organizations, and similar groups can be helpful for finding people with other,
more specific characteristics. Many of these groups will be willing to pass along
messages to members, particularly if the research may be of interest to them. If you
can find a group of people that meet your specific needs, it may help to go to them.
If you can give a short presentation at a meeting and make yourself available for
questions later, you may encourage otherwise reluctant people to participate. Email
lists and online groups can be helpful in this regard as well, but these tools should
be used carefully: sending out messages that don't comply with the policies of the
posted group or lists is inappropriate. Sending unsolicited email messages directly
to individuals is almost certainly a bad idea. Although an email message that comes
from a trusted mailing list might be well received, the same message sent directly by
an individual might be seen as annoying junk email.
Focused ethnography and long-term case studies require fewer subjects, but the
effort involved in enrolling each participant may be greater. These projects may
require building cooperative arrangements with companies, schools, other organi-
zations, and individuals in order to identify appropriate subjects. Many academic
researchers address these challenges by bringing in outside organizations as collabo-
rators. In addition to creating a formal agreement, collaboration can also provide
funds that support the efforts of the cooperating organizations.
Incentives can often motivate people to participate. Many undergraduates have
been lured into research sessions by promises of cash or pizza. If you can pay your
subjects for their time, do so. Gifts can be more appropriate for some participants—
particularly children. If you don't have enough funds to pay all participants, you
can offer to enter them in a raffle for a desirable prize. Compensation can also be
a motivator that can elicit desired behavior: in one study on interruption, research-
ers asked participants to both complete a memory task and respond to interrupting
signals. In order to entice participants to complete both tasks, extra payment was
given to the subjects with the best performance (Gluck et al., 2007). Incentives for
organizations that assist in recruiting can also be useful. In addition to the research
collaborations described above, you might pay groups as consultants (see the Menu
Task Performance Studies with Blind Users sidebar for an example).
Although financial and other incentives are routinely used to encourage partici-
pation in research studies, it is certainly appropriate to consider the potential impact
that prospects of financial gain might have on participant behavior. Researchers have