Recruitment Strategies for Intervention Research: Lessons Learned from the Autism Parent Navigators Study.

Social work researchers often conduct intervention research with populations experiencing hardships, stigma, and structural disadvantages that create challenges for recruiting study participants. As a result, even well-designed clinical intervention trials often fail to achieve their recruitment goals (Baucom et al., 2018). Despite the critical role of recruitment in the success of social work research, scholars seldom convene to evaluate the efficacy of recruitment sources and strategies. This limits our ability to develop effective, cost-efficient clinical trial recruitment plans that are appealing and valuable to participants. Our aim is to contribute to the literature on social work intervention research by evaluating the recruitment strategies used throughout a five-year randomized controlled trial and offering implications for others doing this work. This study, targeting caregiver dyads of children recently diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), is well suited to this purpose because of the number and diversity of recruitment strategies used over five years.