September 2005
Volume 18, Number 9
Engaging Research Participants
The nagging thought that ran through my head as I prepared to run my first study with undergraduate participants was "I sure hope they do a better job than I used to do when I was an undergrad!" As an apprehensive freshman participant, I just wanted to get a taste of what it would be like to be a psychology major and also put five or ten bucks in my pocket. I sincerely wanted to help the researchers too, and I certainly didn't want to disappoint anyone, but on a few occasions I couldn't help feeling like I had done just that.
Some of those studies were pretty boring, and others seemed unnecessarily taxing ("you want me to read how many pages of instructions?!"). I felt especially bad when a memory researcher asked me earnestly "are you sure that's all you can remember?" after I had done my best to recall long strings of nonsense syllables. Looking back, of course, I don't know if his entreaties were a part of his study design or not—I guess I didn't always read the debriefing sheets too carefully back then, either.
So you would think that, armed with these memories, I would set out to design the most compelling, fun, and educational studies that I could. But of course, that's not how it really worked out. In my zeal to get the "right" data, it was just too easy to keep adding more and more questionnaires and filler tasks. And I heard my share of complaints about it ("why did you ask the same question over and over?" was a familiar refrain). There were always a few students who protested by responding randomly on questionnaires, or pushing random keys during computer tasks—and then there was the one who refused to take off his headphones, whose guarantee that he would leave his CD player off was not particularly reassuring.
But it seemed that most of the time, even when the tasks themselves weren't the most inspiring, the student participants were still genuinely interested in what the study was about. I found that the little extra time that I put into making the debriefing sheets and sessions educational, and honestly taking all of students' questions (and even their study design suggestions) seriously, were qualities that were well appreciated. An occasional student even referred friends to participate—although that might have been because I was conducting narcissism research and they thought their friends were narcissistic!
Of course, I'm not recommending designing long, arduous studies. But in my experience, as long as there is something engaging about a study, students who have already gone out of their way to participate in it will leave with a positive attitude.
The educational drive of the undergraduates in these studies makes me particularly confident that they are taking their participation seriously. But it can also have a downside. In my experience, "real world" participants are very likely to take a study at face value, while curious and savvy students (especially the ones who are in psychology classes) are more likely to try to "outwit" your design and hypotheses. Usually, this means that they try to give you the outcome they believe you're hoping for, but occasionally their motives aren't so benign. Luckily, they're wrong about the details more often than they're right. But whatever their motivation, or how accurate they are about the study's details, the student participants who "analyzed" the studies while they were participating in them caused me great concern about the validity and generalizability of my data (especially when coupled with the demographic outlier status of most of the students). For me, that means that I'm more comfortable using undergraduates in straightforward, correlational research than in cleverly designed experiments. But plenty of my colleagues in graduate school have disagreed with me about that.
Practically speaking, having a good study pool was a tremendous help—in general, participants from psychology classes took their participation more seriously than those who were just there to make a few bucks. As for those paid participants, freshmen in their first few weeks of school, and seniors in their final ones (post-thesis!) were the most reliable. I was also surprised to find that most students prefer a guaranteed small sum of money over a chance to win a big prize in a lottery drawing. But most of all, it seemed that conveying to the undergraduates (implicitly or explicitly) that I was excited about the research, and that I cared about them and their experience as participants, led to the most rewarding experience for them, and the best data for me. And adding a bottomless bowl of candy to the mix didn't hurt either!
SETH A. ROSENTHAL is a PhD candidate at Harvard University.
