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[figler]

In my social science field, we need to publish at least two articles a year.  That means collecting data for two studies every year.  If I have the data, I can easily writeup two studies during the summer, but in order to do that I need to get the data collection finished during the school year.  I can do this if one study is a paper and pencil survey, but those are harder to publish than more time-intensive interviews.  How do people get all the data collection done when you have to do IRB, recruitment and finally interview the participants?  Can you do two interview studies in one year?

I have thought about trying to get two papers out of one pool of participants, since the recruitment is part of what takes so much time.  So then I would ask people who agree to participate to do two different interviews, instead of one.

Any other ideas? 

[locutus]

What stage are you?
My first thought is research assistants.

[figler]

I do use research assistants, but they need supervision.  I'm just starting on the tenure track and I don't have grad students; my RAs are undergrads. I am the one who has to contact organizations where I can recruit participants.  I have to train RAs and supervise all data collection. We do interviews off-campus, and I always have to be there.  I also have to train RAs to transcribe and code interviews.  My RAs have been great.

I am interested in answers to this question for people both with and without grad students, since I hope to have grad student eventually.

[august_leo]

In my second year TT and I also do work with human subjects. Here are some things that have helped me:

Create a lab e-mail account. This way, you can have the undergraduate research assistants check for e-mails and do scheduling with the participants without you having to charge of everything. You can still contact the individual organizations yourself, but then once participants are contacting you, you can have the students take care of them.

Also, create a lab calendar. Something that can be looked at both on and off campus. This way, someone else can do the confirming and if there is something like a snowstorm then you can also cancel appointments without going into work.

And, keep a database of participants. Maybe your department has one of the use, it is quite common. Our department sends students out to recruit off the street twice a year. For my purposes, I also put up posters and local supermarket, ads in newspapers, etc. I often invite my participants to come back for future studies if the studies don't conflict in some sort of method or hypothesis.

I have helped with the data collection, I have always set aside set times for that to happen. Just like teaching. For example, Wednesday 1 to 5 PM, Thursday 1 to 6 PM. I also tried to schedule the maintenance as close together as possible. For example if something takes 45 minutes I like to schedule them about 45 minutes to an hour apart. That way, there is limited down time. Can you use your research assistants to do as much of the waiting around as possible? For example, they can hand participants the consent forms. Or meet them in the hallway and bring them to your testing room. You said that you collected off campus, but I don't know if you mean in participants' homes, a jail, or a place like a school.

Depending on your subjects are, I know of others who offer extra credit to their students in their courses to do their studies.

Training research assistants can take a lot of time. When I was in graduate school I would've videotaped myself training one or two undergraduate research assistance, and then I would have the others watch that video. That way, I was certain that everyone had learned the same material, and everyone had learned from me.

I have also created "lab manuals" for training students to transcribe and code data. You should also be able to save time by having your students enter the data for you.

Recently, I read an article in a magazine for graduate students here in Britain. The article recommended  "snowballing" that is, getting participants to recruit each other. The idea is to tell participants that they should refer to their friends. Then, the lab keeps track of how the number of participants has snowballed from the first participant.  For example, say I participate in your study then I recruit Larry C. and Fiona and they each in turn recruit another 10 participants. Over time, the number of participants you will get from simply having asked me to start referring friends will start to grow exponentially. The article suggested offering a reward, I guess something like an Amazon gift card, to the participate should lead to the largest number of follow-up participants. Maybe that idea will work for you.

I have also seen other people run multiple studies at the same time like you suggest. I have done this a couple of times myself. I tell participants that I'm recruiting them for one study I might have another one available at the same time. Then, depending on if there really is time after they finish, I asked if they would like to do another study. There is a new consent form to fill out. Of course, the two studies have to be quite different. Generally, this looks out really well. In fact, I am hoping to do this more often. If you think that there could be carryover effects though, you probably would want to do it.

I hope this was helpful.

[mirandaf]

Do you have to do original data collection always? Do you have the option or inclination to work with existing, publicly available data, for instance?

(This is common enough in my discipline, but may differ in yours so... YMMV.)

[shrek]

Extra credit to participate in a project is often frowned upon by IRBs (coersion)
Can't you design a study with multiple interrelated questions? It takes a while to develop, but once you have a protocol you bring in subjects to participate in a study on an on-going basis. Once you have enough to address question 1, you write that up. But, maybe question 2 needs a higher n because the subjects are divided into two groups by age, etc. etc. (repeat and write)

[locutus]

Extra credit to participate in a project is often frowned upon by IRBs (coersion)

In my experience they can be pretty lax about this.

Anyway it doesn't sound like the OP is working with traditional college students.

OP, is there anyway to get around having to be there for all of the off-campus data collection? Is this some sort of IRB requirement?

[august_leo]

I dictated my post earlier (because it was so long), and few words were underlined as typos, but sorry for some odd errors (corrected below).

In my second year TT and I also do work with human subjects. Here are some things that have helped me:

Create a lab e-mail account. This way, you can have the undergraduate research assistants check for e-mails and do scheduling with the participants without you having to charge of everything. You can still contact the individual organizations yourself, but then once participants are contacting you, you can have the students take care of them.

Also, create a lab calendar. Something that can be looked at both on and off campus. This way, someone else can do the confirming and if there is something like a snowstorm then you can also cancel appointments without going into work.

And, keep a database of participants. Maybe your department has one for everyone to use, it is quite common. Our department sends students out to recruit off the street twice a year. For my purposes, I also put up posters and local supermarket, ads in newspapers, etc. I often invite my participants to come back for future studies if the studies don't conflict in some sort of method or hypothesis.

When I have helped with the data collection, I have always set aside set times for that to happen. Just like teaching. For example, Wednesday 1 to 5 PM, Thursday 1 to 6 PM. I also tried to schedule the appointments as close together as possible. For example if something takes 45 minutes I like to schedule them about 45 minutes to an hour apart. That way, there is limited down time. Can you use your research assistants to do as much of the waiting around as possible? For example, they can hand participants the consent forms. Or meet them in the hallway and bring them to your testing room. You said that you collected off campus, but I don't know if you mean in participants' homes, a jail, or a place like a school.

Depending on who your subjects are, I know of others who offer extra credit to their students in their courses to do their studies.

Training research assistants can take a lot of time. When I was in graduate school I would videotape myself training one or two undergraduate research assistance, and then I would have the others watch that video. That way, I was certain that everyone had learned the same material, and everyone had learned from me.

I have also created "lab manuals" for training students to transcribe and code data. You should also be able to save time by having your students enter the data for you.

Recently, I read an article in a magazine for graduate students here in Britain. The article recommended  "snowballing" that is, getting participants to recruit each other. The idea is to tell participants that they should refer their friends. Then, the lab keeps track of how the number of participants has snowballed from the first participant.  For example, say I participate in your study then I recruit LarryC and Fiona and they each in turn recruit another 10 participants. Over time, the number of participants you will get from simply having asked me to start referring friends will start to grow exponentially. The article suggested offering a reward, I guess something like an Amazon giftcard, to the participate who led to the largest number of follow-up participants. Maybe that idea will work for you.

I have also seen other people run multiple studies at the same time like you suggest. I have done this a couple of times myself. I tell participants that I'm recruiting them for one study I might have another one available at the same time. Then, depending on if there really is time after they finish, I asked if they would like to do another study. There is a new consent form to fill out. Of course, the two studies have to be quite different. Generally, this works out really well. In fact, I am hoping to do this more often. If you think that there could be carryover effects though, you probably would want to do it.

I hope this was helpful.

[msparticularity]

I'm in my second year TT and fourth year out, and have worked on human subjects stuff for six years now. I cannot even conceive of trying to do new data collection every year, let alone more than once a year! In fact, I'm just now getting ready to do my third round of data collection ever. My human subjects work is all mixed-method, so I've been able to get one fairly standard research report out for each one, making the quant stuff the backbone and using the qual for elaboration of the quant data points. Then, so far I have always had enough interesting stuff that was suggested by some of the qual data to make my study implications a full independent paper, exploring the possibilities, making connections with other studies, and suggesting likely follow-ups. I have also done a couple of methodological self-studies of my work, which is actually what I find the most interesting and informative. And often I have done a theoretical paper up front, looking at the philosophical undergirding for the study I'm in the process of putting together.

All of this is somewhat discipline and department-specific, of course. My work cuts across several disciplines, so I'm able to work in a variety of modes.

[figler]

This all is so helpful that I'm re-reading it (and bumping it up).  I'm planning to collect data for two studies again this year.  Last year I had a survey study and an interview study where there was no transcriptions or complicated coding.  This year t I need to do the complicated study--with individual interviews at schools, and open-ended questions that must be transcribed and coded with reliability. I have more RAs this year and some are very competent adult students, but I'm still overwhelmed.

For the second study, I may uses the same population as in the first and tack on interview questions.  If it's a relatively short interview, it could be combined with the first study's interview  (eg. 20 minutes for study 1 and 10 minutes for study 2).  I was thinking that the topic would be similar enough to do one IRB application and consent form. I assume when I write them up I'd have to report that the data for each study was collected as part of a larger study and I'd have to be sure that there wouldn't be any priming problems.  Any other concerns I should be aware of?

[inthelab]

Extra credit to participate in a project is often frowned upon by IRBs (coersion)

For many medical studies, subjects are paid though.

[kohelet]

freedos,

In regard to your idea about conducting two interviews for each subject, I think you're on the right track here, but let me suggest what I (and others I know) do.  When I'm doing intensive data collection, whether interviews or surveys, I, too, want to get the most "bang for the buck," so I'm always thinking about getting multiple papers out of the data.  

I do this two ways:  

1) I have two closely related studies going on at the same time.  The sampling strategy has to make sense for both studies for this two work.  The questions are all more or less on the same topic, so, to the respondent, it's just one big study.  And it's one big dataset.  And to IRB, it's just one big research project, which I hope will culminate in more than one research report--totally fine.  

2) I always think about individual research projects from a few different publication angles (sometimes along with #1 above, sometimes not so much).  For example, I'm working on a study now that will yield a traditional, scholarly, theory building/testing paper; a paper with more of an applied focus, which I'll submit to a niche journal; and a pedagogy paper exploring the implications of the study for teaching, which I've already submitted to my discipline's teaching journal.

[msparticularity]

This all is so helpful that I'm re-reading it (and bumping it up).  I'm planning to collect data for two studies again this year.  Last year I had a survey study and an interview study where there was no transcriptions or complicated coding.  This year t I need to do the complicated study--with individual interviews at schools, and open-ended questions that must be transcribed and coded with reliability. I have more RAs this year and some are very competent adult students, but I'm still overwhelmed.

For the second study, I may uses the same population as in the first and tack on interview questions.  If it's a relatively short interview, it could be combined with the first study's interview  (eg. 20 minutes for study 1 and 10 minutes for study 2).  I was thinking that the topic would be similar enough to do one IRB application and consent form. I assume when I write them up I'd have to report that the data for each study was collected as part of a larger study and I'd have to be sure that there wouldn't be any priming problems.  Any other concerns I should be aware of?

The only thing I see that you'd need to be aware of is whether the types of questions for the second study would change the risk category of the entire thing. For example, if Study #1 with the survey plus interview is focused upon low-risk and non-personal information, but the second study asks for personal detail that would make the process higher-risk, it could make more sense to write two protocols.

My grad students and I run into this choice all the time, because depending upon how we design studies of classroom practices, we're either just doing observations of instructional practice and curriculum-related classroom interactions (exempt category and expedited review), or we're also interviewing the teacher and/or the students, including asking questions that elicit more information about prior experiences and beliefs (Category I). And when I work with people in counseling education, sometimes they want to add measures for stuff like self-efficacy (Category II).