Ideas for recruiting recent sexual assault survivors for research

Post date: 2021-07-23 10:10:52

I'm a researcher. My colleagues and I develop and test brief early interventions (i.e., for use in the first months after sexual assault) to help survivors recover. Participation in our studies involves either getting an intervention for free or giving feedback on an intervention we're developing. These studies don't require in-person visits, and they're all low risk and fairly low commitment. We pay participants, although survivors usually say they're participating to help other survivors. Normally, we have a steady stream of recent survivors wanting to participate, but we're having major problems finding participants right now, and need new ideas.

We have a few studies that are currently having problems with recruiting:
*We're looking for survivors of assaults that happened in the past 3 years to come to one Zoom session with someone who supported them after the assault (a friend, family member, partner, etc.), and give us feedback on a new intervention for survivors and their supporters
*We have two clinical trials of low-burden ways to get the effective ingredients of evidence-based therapies to recent survivors. Both target posttraumatic stress and alcohol use stemming from the assault. One is an app for survivors of assaults that happened in the past 10 weeks, and the other is telehealth therapy for survivors of assaults that happened in the past year.

Things we've tried:
*We have lots of long-standing strong partnerships with national and local survivor-serving organizations/agencies/providers of various types who give survivors our flyers/website. They've all said they have long waitlists of recent survivors seeking services, so I know that it's not that fewer people have been assaulted recently. I think the problem is that providers are super overloaded right now, and helping us recruit is just one more thing to do on top of lots of more pressing things.
*We send mass recruitment emails to enrolled students at our university- this has been our most successful strategy in the past year, but I would much prefer to enroll a more diverse group of survivors than college students.
*We put up flyers in women's bathrooms in bars and gyms- we've gotten a few people this way.
*We post ads on Instagram and Facebook- this has been almost totally unsuccessful, even though I worked with a marketing specialist to develop and target the ads. We also tried posting in some subreddits, although it was a nightmare to manage the responses.

It's not totally clear to me what the problem is. It's always sort of hard to find survivors so soon after an assault, but never this hard. I assume that it's at least in part because people are re-engaging with real life post COVID, and maybe aren't willing to make the time commitment.

The only other thing I've thought about is finding message boards that recent survivors use that we could post ads on, or online support groups that we could present at. I feel somewhat pessimistic about cold emailing more organizations to ask them to spread the word, given that we're not successfully getting participants via the organizations that we already have a close relationship with. Any ideas about other approaches to recruiting that we haven't thought of would be deeply appreciated.

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