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Recruiting participants from underserved communities is crucial for many studies, yet the effectiveness of different recruitment approaches, particularly for smartphone-based research, is not well understood. This study compares the performance of three strategies – mailings, advertisements, and in-person appeals – for recruiting individuals from lower-income neighborhoods in Baltimore City, U.S.A. into an app-based study about public transit use. We initially used mail and in-person outreach; in-person recruiting was more cost-effective, but neither method met our recruitment goals. We then launched an advertising campaign in city buses and bus shelters, which was most cost-effective and yielded the largest number of participants, including many low-income individuals, who were more likely than others to use our research app for subsequent study tasks. Each recruitment strategy reached somewhat different demographic groups. These findings suggest that public transit-based advertising is effective for engaging underserved populations in app-based research, and that multiple, complementary strategies help recruit a more diverse sample.
Antoun et al. (Fri,) studied this question.