In-Depth Interviews: Using an agency to recruit participants
It is unlikely that a company conducting customer interviews is going to spend time cold-calling the general public to recruit participants. Typically they contact a market research recruiting company. These companies have a database of people in the general public who are willing to participate in research studies, such as a customer interview.
If an outside agency is doing the recruiting, then I usually write the screener in the form of a script. The recruiter calls potential participants and walks them through a series of questions. People are dismissed if they don’t match the criteria. If they do meet the criteria, then they are tallied so that the minimum and maximum number of people specified for each criteria is adhered to.
I have experienced a couple of problems when interviewing participants recruited by outside agencies. The reason that these problems arise is straightforward, but the solution is not. Recruiting companies have a vested interest in finding participants who match the screening questionnaire, while at the same time spending the least amount of time and money on the search. That means that their database of known participants is the first stop for your research sample. This database includes people who they’ve used before for similar projects, who in some cases “do testing” for extra cash. Such people are usually determined to take on whatever persona the researcher seems to want them to have, so that in the end, the data from these sessions is worse than useless, because it is misleading.
The second problem I’ve experienced is related to the first. The research recruiter’s database may include people who are unemployed and who desperately need the incentive money. They give very brief answers, waiting for the session to end so they can collect the money or gift card and disappear.
Of course, there are recruiting companies who are very adept at what they do. They try hard to eliminate the two types of problem participants mentioned above. I don’t hesitate to call them when I’m not able to recruit more directly and precisely from a customer database. But I add a fudge factor to the number of participants, anticipating that at least 10% of the participants will not contribute useful information to the study, and so adjust the total number of recruited participants accordingly.
Copyright 2009, Paul Bryan, Usography Corporation (www.usography.com)
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