Recruiting Military Families for Prevention Trials: Future Directions Suggested By Earlier Civilian and Emerging Military Research

Literature highlights the need for research guiding recruitment of participants in preventive intervention studies (Blom-Hoffman et al., 2009; Prinz et al., 2001), particularly in the case of family-focused prevention trials (Spoth, Redmond et al., 2015; Spoth et al., 2013 ). One important knowledge gap concerns recruitment of military families into prevention trials, especially considering anecdotal evidence indicating wide-ranging issues and barriers. These include privacy concerns, data security constraints, complex recruitment-related approval processes, and the need to apply resource-intensive recruitment strategies. Although relevant studies involving military families are sparse, recruitment research with civilian families provides valuable insights and strategies that can be tailored to address the challenges of conducting recruitment research with military families.

This presentation will examine recruitment-related findings from prevention trials conducted with civilian families, as well as results from an ongoing trial entitled “Promoting Strong Military Families: PROSPER Partnerships.” Results from civilian prevention trials will include: (1) influences of family consumer preferences for various program features; (2) the role of monetary incentives; (3) key predictors of enrollment based on theory-based participation factor models; (4) addressable conditions leading to refusals noted by parents; (5) comparative effectiveness of recruitment strategies.

In this context, findings based on observations from the Strong Military Families project will be presented. Exploratory analyses of the relative frequency of sources of study information (e.g., friend, child’s school, military, USO) reported by study participants will be discussed, as will the relative differences in engagement of potential Active Duty (AD) and National Guard/Reserve (NGR) participants associated with these sources. Preliminary findings indicate that schools are the leading source of study information (42%), followed by military-connected sources (25%), the USO (18%), community events (7%), friends (5%), and military spouse groups (4%). The relative frequency of these sources differed across military component (AD or NGR; χ² = 19.66, p< .001). In this connection, military sources were relatively more frequently cited as sources for NGR (versus AD) participants, whereas the USO and community events were relatively more cited for AD participants.

Practical, overarching conclusions from work to date and suggestions for future directions will be discussed. These will include the need to address specific issues and barriers associated with military family recruitment, particularly concerning reduction of its costs and improvement in efficiency and effectiveness.