Participant Recruitment and Management

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Abstract The Participant Recruitment and Management Core, consisting of a full-time Coordinator and a parttime research assistant and guided by the Core Director, was designed from the ground up to provide services to assist center investigators in the following ways: (1) The identification and recruitment of participants, (2) Management of contacts with participants in existing studies, and (3) Provide training in human subjects and act as a liaison between investigators, the local institutional review board (IRB) and human subject consortiums. PARC has established the necessary infrastructure to meet these aims. Specifically, PARC has designed a number of databases geared towards targeting households for recruitment and keeping track of individuals' participation in Center projects, as well as a database of regional organizations that can assist in participant recruitment either as recruitment sites or as resources for targeting likely participants. PARC also assists Center investigators' recruitment efforts by providing demography services to target specific geographical areas that would result in more efficient recruiting. Furthermore, PARC maintains regular contact with past participants through regular newsletter and birthday card mailings, and is able to employ a number of tracking methods to find "lost" households, thus maximizing participant retention. Finally, the Core brings together Center investigators and staff for workshops on current participant targeting and recruitment strategies and the latest developments in human subject policies. These specialized services are often not fundable through R01 mechanisms and are not provided elsewhere. For the future, the Core plans to expand its current aims outlined above to include: 1) Greater integration with the Digital and Electrical Engineering and Analytic Techniques and Technology Cores of the Center, 2) Improved investigator access to PARC resources and services, 3) Contributions to the scholarship of participant recruitment and retention, and 4) Tailoring of PARC services to clinical trials/translational research.