Skills ScratchPad: Navigating Multilingual Research: Part 1 - Recruitment
Last quarter, I conducted an end to end multilingual qualitative study with research participants with zero to limited proficiency in English. I adapted my research methodologies to the linguistic and cultural contexts of my participants. Through this, I learned that paying close attention to recruitment and understanding participant cultural context was especially key for this study. This strengthened skillsets in my research toolkit that I hope might spark some thought within my Skills ScratchPad community! Soo.. let’s talk about it. I’ll share a couple of key learnings on my research process as I reflect on my experiences.
Recruitment
My first aspect of recruiting participants was to screen them for eligibility for this study using a short survey through Survey Monkey. I included the following steps in my recruitment process to make sure I was reaching my intended target of participants who specifically might have zero- limited English proficiency in my research target languages.?
This was a multi-step effort but worth it so I could ensure that I was including voices of participants who would benefit from the translated survey.
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Gathering Participant Cultural Context
As someone who is always learning about various regional and cultural contexts around the world, I knew before conducting qualitative interviews that I needed to do contextual research before interviews. Before I selected participants to conduct qualitative Zoom interviews with, I wanted to understand certain key things. What were certain cultural norms I needed to be aware of for participants in the countries I was reaching out to? How did they differ by region? Any virtual call tips/etiquette my colleagues had experienced with our customers/partners from that region?
I reached out to colleagues who had lived experiences in participant regions and scheduled 1 on 1 sessions. In addition to tips for my upcoming interviews, I also gained tips for my recruitment survey. e.g. I was puzzled by the higher-than-usual number of participants who filled out the screener survey but selected 'No' for an interview.? However, after gathering specific context for one of my audiences,? I learned:
I therefore adjusted my screener to remove the word “video”? and saw more participants in my second batch of recruitment indicating a willingness to participate in interviews. While not a super rigorous scientific learning here - it was worth having those 1 on 1s to help inform tweaks I made during recruitment.?
Lessons learned
This was one of the learning curves for me - and something that upon reflection I should have actually done prior to sending out my recruitment screener for the first batch of participants. I thought I’d only need context for my interviews but if I had gathered context before recruitment- that would have actually saved me the time of reworking my survey.? Upon reflecting on my initial video requirement, I also understood how it could exclude people that lived in areas with low-bandwidth where Zoom video would take up a lot of data.
From refining my recruitment process to understanding the nuances of cultural context, each step contributed to adjustments that helped in my research process. There’s more that I learned about conducting the qualitative interviews themselves and synthesizing/storytelling - including bloopers from my interviews (anyone had a Google Translate qual interview before?!) I’ll break this in multiple parts so it’s easily digestible for YOU to read - but honestly also less daunting for me to reflect on at a go. Until next time - let me know if you have any questions or comments that I can think about for a next article- I’m learning as I go along too!