- Title
- The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health: using focus groups to inform recruitment
- Creator
- Tavener, Meredith; Mooney, Rosemary; Thomson, Clare; Loxton, Deborah
- Relation
- JMIR Research Protocols Vol. 5, Issue 1, no. e31
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/resprot.5020
- Publisher
- JMIR Publications
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- Background: Recruitment and retention of participants to large-scale, longitudinal studies can be a challenge, particularly when trying to target young women. Qualitative inquiries with members of the target population can prove valuable in assisting with the development of effective recruiting techniques. Researchers in the current study made use of focus group methodology to identify how to encourage young women aged 18-23 to participate in a national cohort online survey. Objective: Our objectives were to gain insight into how to encourage young women to participate in a large-scale, longitudinal health survey, as well as to evaluate the survey instrument and mode of administration. Methods: The Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health used focus group methodology to learn how to encourage young women to participate in a large-scale, longitudinal Web-based health survey and to evaluate the survey instrument and mode of administration. Nineteen groups, involving 75 women aged 18-23 years, were held in remote, regional, and urban areas of New South Wales and Queensland. Results: Focus groups were held in 2 stages, with discussions lasting from 19 minutes to over 1 hour. The focus groups allowed concord to be reached regarding survey promotion using social media, why personal information was needed, strategies to ensure confidentiality, how best to ask sensitive questions, and survey design for ease of completion. Recruitment into the focus groups proved difficult: the groups varied in size between 1 and 8 participants, with the majority conducted with 2 participants. Conclusions: Intense recruitment efforts and variation in final focus group numbers highlights the "hard to reach" character of young women. However, the benefits of conducting focus group discussions as a preparatory stage to the recruitment of a large cohort for a longitudinal Web-based health survey were upheld.
- Subject
- focus groups; methodology; surveys; longitudinal studies; participant recruitment; social media; web-based survey; mobile phones
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1346704
- Identifier
- uon:29915
- Identifier
- ISSN:1929-0748
- Rights
- ©Meredith Tavener, Rosemary Mooney, Clare Thomson, Deborah Loxton. Originally published in JMIR Research Protocols (http://www.researchprotocols.org), 22.02.2016. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work, first published in JMIR Research Protocols, is properly cited. The complete bibliographic information, a link to the original publication on http://www.researchprotocols.org, as well as this copyright and license information must be included.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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