Recruitment challenges: Finding couples for a qualitative study on unintended pregnancy

Background: Research on reproductive intentions, including contraceptive use, often relies on the woman's perspective. But clearly, her partner's response must be considered. Couple research provides valuable insight into relationship dynamics and the couple's decision-making process around pregnancy intention. Understanding the couple perspective facilitates the designing of more effective reproductive health interventions. However, engaging diverse couples to discuss sensitive topics is challenging. This poster will assess a variety of successful recruitment activities utilized to engage diverse couple in qualitative interviews.

Methods: Details of recruitment strategies, as well as utility and success will be reported. Recruitment topics include but are not limited to strengthening prior community connections, expanding, couple compensation, targeted use of Craig's List, employing a modified snowball technique and pre-interview check in procedures.

Results: Recruitment strategies helped surpass the goal of 10 couples. Data saturation was achieved after 15 couples were interviewed. Of those couples, 37% were from diverse groups.

Conclusions: Lessons learned were the importance of building on prior professional relationships; respectful prescreening of the couples and the planning the interviews around the couples' needs built trust; and the couples were eager to share their experiences. Although this was a qualitative study, ample inclusion of couples from diverse communities strengthened our results. Our innovative recruitment and engagement of diverse couples is an important step to assuring the design of more effective interventions for reproductive planning.