Obtaining and Keeping Your Sample: Participant Recruitment and Panel Maintenance

Recruiting study participants and maintaining their participation over multiple study waves is vital for research in the developmental sciences and beyond. Which strategies for obtaining and keeping your sample are successful depends on the individual research setting. In this chapter, we discuss the most important challenges and provide best-practice recommendations on how to master those challenges based on the current methodological literature. Since sampling study participants is discussed in Chapter I.1, we assume that the sample has already been selected and the remaining questions are how to establish contact, initial cooperation, and sustained participation. Regarding participant recruitment, we focus on the topics of fieldwork material and protocols, building rapport, recruitment mode, and participation incentives. Regarding panel maintenance, we focus on how to avoid and deal with panel attrition (i.e., dropout of study participants over time) as well as the challenge of panel conditioning (i.e., participants changing their behavior and/or attitudes due to being under study).