This page focuses on the recruitment and compensation processes connected to data collection, ensuring participants can access and engage in interviews, focus groups, and hackathons. For the Safety 7 project, we utilized youth researchers and community partners to support recruitment, and we provided gift card incentives to honor the participants’ time and expertise.
Recruitment
Safety 7 utilized purposeful snowball sampling and voluntary response sampling, described in the Prepare stage. Participants responded to the screener survey more frequently for this project through voluntary response sampling. We created recruitment materials to support Safety 7 members and community partners in their recruitment efforts.
Downloadable Resource
Incentives
It is important to secure and distribute incentives to participants if your budget allows. In our proposal development stage, we knew we wanted to offer $30 gift cards to all participants and $10 e-gift cards to participants who provided a referral through snowball sampling. We used Giftbit to purchase our gift cards and our project manager distributed e-gift cards to participants via YakChat, a secure texting platform, or email, as indicated on the screener survey. We recommend keeping organized records of incentive purchases and distributions to ensure participants are paid in a timely manner.
Downloadable Resource
The Safety 7 includes seven youth researchers (Zionnah Garnett, Elijah Jones, London Mclean, Jermese Perkins, Ife Tobechi, Ike Tobechi, and Meagan Tutt) who make all key research decisions in partnership with staff from Child Trends and Sasha Bruce Youthwork. The Safety 7 is supported by Quiana Lewis Wallace and Deja Logan from Child Trends, Courtney Gibbs, and Bianca Faccio from Sasha Bruce Youthwork. Principal investigators for the study are Samantha Holquist and Quiana Lewis Wallace (Child Trends) with support from Kelly Murphy. Jennifer Widstrand (Child Trends) served as the Project Director. Additional contributions came from Ja’Chelle Ball, Kenya Downing, Jessica Conway, Olivia Reyes, and Alyssa Scott (Child Trends), and Deborah Shore, Donnell Potts, Ivana Gutierrez, and Jane McGhee (Sasha Bruce Youthwork).
If you have questions about the Centering Youth Experiences to Address Community Violence project, please contact Principal Investigator Quiana Lewis Wallace at qlewiswallace@childtrends.org.
This project was supported by Award No. 15PNIJ-22-GG-01420-RESS, awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication/program/exhibition are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice.