The National Children’s Study: Early Recruitment Outcomes Using the Direct Outreach Approach

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: In 2009, the National Children's Study (NCS) Vanguard Study tested the feasibility of household-based recruitment and participant enrollment by using a birth rate probability sample. In 2010, the NCS Program Office launched 3 alternative recruitment methods. We tested whether direct outreach (DO) recruitment could be a more efficient strategy to recruit women of child-bearing age. METHODS:The NCS DO recruitment approach recruited women, 18 to 49 years, who were pregnant or trying to conceive using passive recruitment methods emphasizing broad community outreach and engagement to create study awareness. Study mailings to listed households included a pregnancy screening questionnaire to identify potentially eligible women from selected neighborhoods to contact the study center. Unique features of this recruitment approach included the following: (1) expansion of selected neighborhoods to maximize potential participant recruitment and enrollment while minimizing in-person participant contact and (2) offering 2 levels of study participation distinguished by data collection intensity. RESULTS:Ten study centers listed 255 475 geographically eligible households for contact representing, on average, 3.3% of households per Primary Sampling Unit. A total of 19 354 women were identified for screening, and 17 421 completed a pregnancy screener representing 6.8% of eligible households. Study-eligible pregnant women were older, more educated, and less likely to be Hispanic than the general population. Only 16% (2786) of 17 421 screened women were study-eligible, and 81.1% of these 2786 women consented to participate. CONCLUSIONS:Although feasible, the DO approach recruited a sample of study-eligible pregnant women significantly different from the population. This recruitment approach was labor intensive for the yield of enrolled women.

Linking Postpartum and Parenting Women With a National Diabetes Prevention Program: Recruitment Efforts, Challenges, and Recommendations

“…With a recruitment goal of 30 participants, we were 53% successful, recruiting 16 women. This trend is similar to other studies showing lower rates of recruitment of medically underserved, low-income pregnant and nonpregnant women in research studies (23–25). It has been reported in the literature that health care providers and public health educators face challenges in implementing interventions in this population of women of childbearing age (25), specifically if a considerable time commitment is required.…”

Effectiveness of community outreach and engagement in recruitment success for a prebirth cohort

“…Based on early results, a decision was made to evaluate additional recruitment strategies in an Alternate Recruitment Substudy (ARS), which began November 2010. The ARS evaluated three different recruitment strategies in 30 additional locations: Direct Outreach (DO) [15], Enhanced Household-Based Recruitment (EHBR) [16], and Provider-Based Recruitment (PBR) [17]. The DO strategy recruited women using community outreach and engagement, including direct mailing.…”

“…data are presented for descriptive purposes only, not as a basis for comparison across ARS strategies. Details about demographic characteristics of samples compared with local populations have been presented elsewhere[14][15][16][17].…”

The National Children’s Study: Recruitment Outcomes Using an Enhanced Household-Based Approach

“…Given the difficulty in identifying preconceptional women, this outcome can be considered one of the strengths of a householdbased recruitment approach, as the EHBR strategy was more successful at recruiting prepregnant women compared with provider-based recruitment 11 and recruitment using direct-to-consumer marketing. 12 Targeted follow-up of the population of women who screened as actively trying to conceive ultimately led to a greater number of children born into the study and provided an opportunity to measure important preconception and early pregnancy exposures. In addition, some EHBR SCs were able to recruit a substantial proportion of infants who were born to mothers who were not actively attempting to become pregnant (PPG3 and PPG4) at the time of initial screening.…”