About this Research Topic

Background

Participant recruitment is a vital part of health research to achieve statistical power, meaningful results , and ultimately generalisability, reproducibility, and rigor of the findings. Whether it is a randomised controlled trial or a cross-sectional online survey study, poor recruitment strategies and underutilisation of behavioural science in protocols hinder generating new knowledge and evidence, subsequently translating research evidence into practice. This is significantly important for the credibility of the researchers and the accountability for using public funds to achieve societal and scientific impact. Therefore, it is important to test, evaluate and learn from strategies used across all disciplines in health research.

The aim of this Research Topic is to generate interdisciplinary knowledge across different health conditions and methodologies in digital health research related to recruitment. This research topic will bring together examples of embedding behavioural science in recruitment processes with considerations of how to improve response rates and retention, representativeness and inclusion of under-represented populations in digital health research. We seek manuscripts on co-production and patient and public engagement informing recruitment strategies, understanding the needs and interests of target populations, and promoting informed decision-making and consent. These could help us understand how the study information can be improved to increase people's willingness to engage with the objectives of the study and opportunities for applying to other contexts. As such multi-method approaches, experimental studies testing different behaviour change techniques and tools (e.g. reminders, animations, decoys, incentives), and theory and data-driven designs are needed to progress in this field. Researchers can report on recruitment processes in previously published research in greater detail than in the existing manuscripts if those processes add new knowledge, novel efforts to improve recruitment, or specific research studies focused specifically on recruitment. Reviews or syntheses of specific recruitment processes or identifications of challenges to the field of digital health will also be considered if they highlight human factors. Recruitment must be for digital health research or use digital tools for recruitment processes.

We are interested in studies that evaluate recruitment processes, human factors in research recruitment, acceptability and feasibility of the digital health intervention research and test for interventions to improve participation in digital health research.

These may include but are not limited to

a. Experimental studies using behaviour change techniques (e.g. hypothetical experiments, randomised controlled trials)

b. Process evaluations evaluating research recruitment processes (e.g. co-design, qualitative research)

c. Studies looking into equity in participant recruitment in digital health research (e.g. systematic reviews, scoping reviews, secondary data analysis etc. )

d. Studies and reports employing user experience (e.g. Patient and Public involvement) to inform research design and/or participatory research methods to evaluate the role of human factors in research design (e.g case studies, opinion pieces, reflective manuscripts, qualitative research etc.)

e. Reviews or syntheses of recruitment processes that summarize best practices or identify specific challenges to the field of digital health.

Manuscripts not responsive to this call are those that do not consider human factors in the recruitment processes, explore health interventions without digital interventions or digital recruitment methods, or that fail to advance the scientific understanding of recruitment processes.

Keywords: Behavioural science, recruitment, experimental research, process evaluations, representativeness, bias, sample size, response rate, equity, sociodemographics, co-design

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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