Recruitment of individuals with dementia and their carers for social research: lessons learned from nine studies

Many health and social care research studies report diffi culties recruiting suffi cient numbers of participants, adding to time and money expenditures and potentially jeopardizing the generalizability of fi ndings. The current article reports the eff ectiveness and resource requirements of recruitment strategies used in nine dementia-related studies conducted in Australia. Articles, notices, or advertisements in targeted specialist newsletters were the most cost-eff ective method of recruitment. The use of service providers to aid recruitment yielded mixed results, but was lengthy in terms of research time. Online and social media were low cost but not reliably eff ective in terms of recruitment potential. Despite using multiple strategies to maximize recruitment, signifi cant challenges were encou ntered achieving the required sample sizes; in most cases these challenges resulted in delays in the recruitment phase. Implications for researchers in the fi elds of dementia and general social/health research are discussed