Paper
Sunday, November 4, 2007
254
Research Issues: Combining Ethics and Economics in the Recruitment of Parents of Young Children for Intervention Research
Lynnette Leeseberg Stamler, RN, PhD1, Linda J. Patrick, RN, BScN, MA, MSc, PhD2, Kristin Knibbs, RN, MN1, Joanne Boyer, RN, BScN1, and Anne W. Snowdon, RN, PhD2. (1) College of Nursing, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada, (2) Faculty of Nursing, University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada
| Learning Objective #1: describe the need for criteria that would assist researchers to ascertain the vulnerability of a group of research participants.
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| Learning Objective #2: examine strategies to offset the vulnerability of a given population.
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Ethical recruitment of participants for research has long been a focus for researchers. A glance through the recent research ethics literature reveals articles examining issues related to recruitment of children, persons with chronic diseases and other vulnerable populations. Despite these issues, there continues to exist a strong desire for increased intervention research, which contributes to evidence-informed practice. Parents of young healthy children are rarely included in descriptions of vulnerable populations. However, in recent research studies examining knowledge and attitudes regarding child automotive safety, and continuing research testing an intervention based on that knowledge and those attitudes, the enrolment of busy parents was difficult. One reason for this may be issues of social desirability – do the parents fear learning that they are, in fact, making less than optimal decisions regarding the safety of their children? In addition, economics comes into the equation when one examines the cost of communicating with large numbers of parents from a variety of sites with the disappointing result of a small response rate. This can be exacerbated when the cost of the intervention is high and funding is limited. Our experiences caused us to reconsider this population as a possible vulnerable population, and examine factors influencing our recruitment processes. In this presentation we focus on the difficulties encountered during the research process, strategies employed to ensure a representative group of parents recruited in an ethical manner and the exploration of this population as vulnerable.