• Question: Who is your target population and how did you go about collecting your participants?

    Asked by anon-180745 to Abby, Amy, Noel, Sam, Viren on 12 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Sam Burton

      Sam Burton answered on 12 Jun 2018:

      My current target population is heavy drinkers, with no previous diagnosis of a substance disorder. This makes recruitment not too bad for me, as to be classified as a heavy drinker they only ave to consume 14 units of alcohol a week, with current guidelines. It works out about 5/6 pints of beer, or one and a half bottles of wine. Which when you think about it, people wouldn’t think would be a lot to drink over the course of a week, some people could drink that in a night.

    • Photo: Noel Brick

      Noel Brick answered on 12 Jun 2018:

      In a lot of my studies I seek trained runners. So I often email local running clubs and running groups to look for volunteers. As part of my research, they get to find out some really cool things about their physiology (e.g. heart rate) and psychology (like their thoughts and how this influences their performance). So most are really keep to take part.
      I also do work with beginner runners, so I look for people beginning new running programmes (think of January and new year’s resolutions, when a lot of people start to exercise!). We can learn a lot about why people begin and, more importantly, why people drop out and stop exercising. We can use this information to try to stop this from happening, and that is REALLY important!

    • Photo: Abby Hunter

      Abby Hunter answered on 13 Jun 2018:

      My current research is concerned with the views of healthcare professionals in relation to smoking in pregnancy. I will be interviewing GPs, midwives, health visitors and stop smoking practitioners. Our team have built up a good database of contacts of people we have worked with in the past. Some staff in the department work closely with GPs and midwives, so we are able to use our contacts to spread the word about our study. We also use twitter and facebook to advertise the study and recruit participants.

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