🗓️Recruitment and Scheduling

Recruitment

Because of the nature of what we study (cognitive abilities) we need to recruit as broadly as possible, and certainly outside of Georgia Tech students. However, recruiting from a broad population is a lot harder than simply relying on students in psychology classes that are required to participate in research studies for class credit.

Our primary sources of recruitment are:

• SONA (only GT students in psychology classes)

• Reddit

• Physical flyers we post around Atlanta

• Facebook Ads

We have study specific Ads for each of these recruitment sources that you can find on the SharePoint - Control Room page.

Scheduling

Regardless of how they found out about the study, we will receive an email from them stating that they are interested in participating. Two thing need to be done when that happens:

1. Check that they had not participated in one of our previous studies

2. Send them an interest email with more details

Check Past Participants

First, you need to make sure they had not participated in one of our previous studies. This is because we administer a lot of the same tasks from one study to the next, so we don't want people that have some exposure and practice on the tasks already.

It is not uncommon to get people signing up on SONA and Reddit that have participated in one of our past studies.

You can check the past participants in the Past Participants excel sheet

This is as easy step to forget, so please do not forget to do this

Send Interest Email

The next step, then, is to respond to their email with more information about the study, asking them more information about themselves to make sure they are eligible, and providing them some available times they can sign up for their first session.

We have study specific Interest Email templates that you can find on the SharePoint - Control Room page.

The Interest Email template should have everything you need, but check the available times and make sure that is accurate.

Schedule

It is common to have several emails back and forth with the participant before we can get them on the schedule.

Once they have agreed on a time for their first session you then need to add them to the Participant Schedule.

Note that we typically only schedule their first session initially. This is because there are always a handful of participants that never show up at all, keep rescheduling, etc. We do not want those participants to clog up the schedule.

After they complete their first session, and before they leave the lab we can go ahead and schedule them for their next session. If they want to schedule their remaining sessions at that time as well, that is fine too.

Reminder Emails

We send out reminder emails the day before they are scheduled to particpate.

We have study specific Reminder Email templates that you can find on the SharePoint - Control Room page.

• You can email multiple participants at once, but you need to BCC them.

• You need to make sure their scheduled date and time is correct in the reminder email