As any social researcher will confirm, one of the most time consuming tasks can be finding people to take part in a project. This is especially the case if you are trying to study a topic that can be seen as ‘sensitive’ (like self-harm maybe, or illegal drug use), or you are trying to speak with people who might be ‘hard to reach’. Most of the research I have done has involved both a difficult topic and a ‘hard to reach’ group of people.
What ‘hard to reach’ often means though is that it just takes a bit longer to ‘reach’ the people in question; or that you might have to try different things out in order to ‘reach’ people before you find one that works. When I designed the SASH project I made sure that I would have plenty time to try out different ways of finding people who might want to take part.
So far I’ve been focusing on contacting youth groups and health projects around Edinburgh, some of who are now loaded up with leaflets about the study and are letting young people know about what I’m doing, so that they can decide whether they want to take part.
I’m going to try out some other ways of letting people know about the project over the next month or so. I’ll be designing a poster that can be put up in different places (like Crew 2000), and I’ll be working on doing some more web-based advertising about the project.
Watch this space!
The SASH Research Project 