Lessons Learned From Adolescent Mothers: Advice on Recruitment

Key wordsAdolescent, depression, research recruitmentAbstractPurpose: Adolescent mothers have high rates of depressive symptoms and inadequate rates of depression evaluation and treatment. The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify characteristics of effective recruitment ads for an Internet-based depression intervention for pregnant and parenting adolescents.Methods: Using focus group methods, participants (N = 35) were recruited and enrolled at a teen parent program, part of the public school system. Focus group sessions were analyzed for participant preferences, rationale for choices, key words, and the frequency of words within the videotapes and audiotapes.Results: Findings indicated that adolescent mothers preferred pictures in which everyone looked happy, narrative that clearly indicated cost and eligibility, and words that they would use in conversation.Clinical Relevance: The study filled an important gap in the literature by soliciting from pregnant and parenting adolescents their preferences regarding visual appeal, content adequacy, and message clarity of advertisements that would motivate them to visit an Internet intervention for depression. Results could be extrapolated to education of pregnant and parenting adolescents in clinical settings.National experts agree that adolescent mothers have high rates of depressive symptoms and inadequate rates of depression evaluation and treatment (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 2005; Williams, O'Connor, Eder, & Whitlock, 2009; Yozwiak, 2010). Internet-based interventions for depression have been successful in overcoming barriers to treatment in adolescents (Christiansen, Griffiths, & Jorm, 2004; O'Kearney, Kang, Christensen, & Griffiths, 2009). However, the best ways to recruit adolescent mothers for an Internet-based intervention for depression are not known. The purpose of this study was to identify characteristics of effective recruitment ads from the perspective of adolescents for an Internet-based depression intervention for adolescent mothers.BackgroundSuccessful and cost-effective recruitment is one of the greatest challenges for researchers, particularly in underserved and minority populations (Logsdon & Gohmann, 2008; Pinto-Foltz, Logsdon, & Derrick, 2011). Difficulty with recruitment is often cited as the reason for failure to reach an estimated sample size, resulting in underpowered studies and serving as a barrier to using research in practice. Strategies to improve research recruitment have been disseminated by the Cochrane Library (Treweek et al., 2010) as well as by noted researchers (Nguyen et al., 2012), but challenges remain.Recently, researchers have begun to use the Internet for research recruitment and interventions (Fenner et al., 2012; Morgan, Jorm, & McKinnon, 2013; Smith, Wilde, & Brasch, 2012). In a recent systematic review, Park and Calamaro (2013) noted the potential of social media for research study recruitment with adolescents and young adults. For example, Facebook has been successfully used to recruit young adults for studies of young adult smokers (Ramo & Prochaska, 2012) and Google ads have been successfully employed to recruit adults to health research websites (Gross, Liv, Contreras, Munoz, & Leykin, 2014). However, the effective characteristics and qualities of the recruitment ads were not discussed, leading to the need for this study.MethodsSampleParticipants were recruited and enrolled at two locations of a teen parent program, which is part of the public school system. The study was approved by the institutional review boards of the university and the site. Eligibility criteria included (a) currently pregnant or adolescent mother who is 13 to 18 years of age; and (b) child lives with adolescent mother. Three groups of adolescent mothers (total N = 35) participated in the study. …