Engaging Participants Through Initial Contact Posted on January 20, 2009 Connecting easily to potential participants is one way to improve recruitment, states Guillermo J. Prado (bio).

Participants who perceive a great need for the intervention may be more likely to engage in the intervention program because they feel they can benefit from the intervention. Participants who are low income or low SES may not participate in the intervention program because they may have limited resources. For example they may have no transportation to get to the intervention program. So there's a lot of research that has been done on this, but what has been studied to a lesser extent is whether, is there something that the therapist or the facilitator can do to overcome some of those other barriers?

So in that particular study what we found is that indeed this initial contact between the participant and the facilitator predicted levels of engagement above and beyond what all of those participant characteristics have predicted, which is a great thing because basically what it says is the conclusion there is that there is something the facilitators can do to bring participants in and engage them into an intervention program. Regardless of what they look like, regardless of whether they're low income or not, regardless of whether there's a perceived need for the intervention program or not.

It's really being able to engage, to connect to the other person on the phone or if it's a face to face visit, being able to find commonalities between the facilitator and the participant for example and trying to overcome some of those barriers initially.

The individuals that we had in that particular study, they were all trained clinicians. They were either social workers or mental health counselors. So in fact if we think about the practicality of this, and if we think of community centers or treatment centers around the country, often times that initial contact between a potential client and the agency is not somebody who's trained. It may be a secretary or it may be an administrative assistant, et cetera. And this perhaps speaks to the importance of that initial contact, and that initial contact may need to be made by somebody else who's a little more trained.