SUMMARY
Background and Objectives
South Africa has a markedly skewed representation where the majority of blood (62%) is presently collected from an ethnically White minority. This study seeks to identify culturally specific factors affecting motivation of donors in South Africa.
Materials and Methods
We performed a qualitative study to evaluate motivators and deterrents to blood donation among Black South Africans. A total of 13 focus groups, comprising a total of 97 Black South Africans, stratified by age and geographic location were conducted. Transcripts of the interviews were analysed using a coding framework by Bednall & Bove.
Results
Participants made 463 unique comments about motivators focusing primarily on promotional communications (28%), incentives (20%) and prosocial motivation (16%). Participants made 376 comments about deterrents which focused primarily on fear (41%), negative attitudes (14%) and lack of knowledge (10%).
Conclusion
Although prosocial motivation (altruism) was the most frequently mentioned individual motivator, promotional communication elicited more overall comments by participants. As reported by many authors, fear and lack of awareness were strong deterrents, but scepticism engendered by perceived racial discrimination in blood collection were unique to the South African environment.
Few empirical studies have evaluated the efficiency of recruitment methods to recruit nonEnglish-speaking research participants. We attempt to fill this research gap by conducting a systematic evaluation using recruitment data from a large cognitive testing study that pretested the translations of the American Community Survey. In our study we contacted 1,084 Chinese and Korean speakers to identify those who spoke little or no English. We measured the efficiency of the recruitment methods (newspaper advertisements, flyers, online communication, and word of mouth) using four criteria: time spent, outreach capacity, screener completion, and eligibility rate. We also examined differences in recruitment efficiencies by recruiters and sublanguage groups. Among the recruitment methods examined, newspaper advertisements were most efficient in reaching a larger number of Asians while using the least amount of recruiters' time. For recruiting non-English speakers, word of mouth by recruiters with strong ties to the ethnic community worked best.
In survey research, cognitive interviewing has been widely used as a tool for pretesting to improve the quality of questionnaires. However, the cognitive interviewing method relies on interview participants' ability to articulate their thought process by answering the probe questions asked during the interview. Including participants who exhibit difficulty in understanding the probe question as intended by the researcher and difficulty in providing the appropriate answer pertinent to the probes affects the quality of cognitive interview outcome. Using main interview and its paradata from 258 non-English language (Chinese and Korean) cognitive interviews which pretest the American Community Survey questionnaire, this paper examines how levels of participant difficulty exhibited during the non-English cognitive interview affect the interview outcome. Furthermore, this paper provides practical guidelines about participant selection to balance interview quality and cost for pretesting translated survey questionnaires. We found that interviews with participants who exhibited greater difficulty were lengthier and did not add more value to the findings; in addition, those participants were less likely to complete any questionnaires in the future.
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