User recruitment

After you have decided on your research questions and planned which methods you are going to use, you need to recruit participants.

For your research to be effective, your participants must be actual or likely users of your service. It’s also important to do research with all the different kinds of people who may need your service, including those who:

• are disabled or use assistive technologies
• have limited digital skills or poor literacy
• may need help to use your service

Recruitment criteria

Before recruiting participants, you need to come up with recruitment criteria. Your recruitment criteria should clearly specify the people you want to participate in your research.

Depending on your service and the research you plan to do, your criteria might include:

• a particular demographic – for example, young people aged 16 to 24
• a specific target user group – such as small business owners or job centre staff
• a particular experience – for example, people who have recently moved home or applied for a government grant
• a problematic situation – such as people who have lost an important document
• particular ways of accessing your service – for example, those who rely on a screen reader, use speech recognition software, or who only access the internet at a library or day centre

Including a broad range of people helps to mitigate bias. Beyond any specific criteria, always try to recruit a spread of people by:

• age
• gender
• ethnicity
• disability
• social and economic status

Recruitment methods

To recruit participants, you can:

• use a research recruitment agency
• work with a professional body, specialist charity or community group
• invite existing users of your service to take part
• find people at a venue on the day
• engage with colleagues to recruit relevant staff

Task

In the next step, there will be a short quiz to check your understanding so far. Take a moment here to reflect on your learning – what was the most surprising or interesting thing you have learned so far in this course?

Share your ideas with fellow learners in the comments.