If you subscribe to the student listserv, you may have noticed an unusual number of listings for surveys and raffle drawings this semester. As seniors race to finish their theses before graduation, dozens of students face an added challenge: recruiting friends, classmates and others to participate as subjects in senior research projects.
For the majority of majors in psychology and sociology: disciplines that heavily rely on empirical data: recruiting human subjects for experiments is necessary for completing the required senior thesis project. For Whitman students, however, finding participants can prove challenging because of the small student body, lack of contact with local residents and certain regulations from the Institutional Review Board.
“Finding participants is always a really difficult process,” said junior psychology major Patricia Xi, who is working as a research assistant on a senior thesis. “I did my research project for the required methodology class last semester and it was really hard getting people to come in. I just kind of gave up and changed the format of the survey so people wouldn’t have to come in. I changed it to a Survey Monkey and it worked a lot better.”
Xi added that the Whitman “bubble” has made it difficult to recruit local residents.
“For members of the community outside, it might be a little weird to come in because they’re not really attached to the Whitman community,” Xi said. “As much as we try to have good community relations, I feel like there’s still a Whitman/Walla Walla divide.”
Finding willing participants can be especially difficult when working with special populations. In the case of senior theses, all aspects of the experiment, including the kind and number of participants, must be approved by a committee of Whitman faculty and local community members known as the Institutional Review Board. The purpose of the board is to protect the safety and comfort of test subjects and to promote legal and ethical research practices.
“There are certain categories of people that are considered more sensitive, so you have to go through more precautions,” said senior sociology major Susannah Lowe, who is writing her thesis on GLBTQ and religious identities.
“One of the reasons I didn’t use minors in my study is because it’s really hard to get the project approved by the IRB, especially if it’s about GLBTQ children,” Lowe said. “In order to involve children, you have to get a parent’s permission. In the past, a student did her project on GLBTQ youth in Walla Walla and she had a really hard time getting through the IRB process because the IRB wanted the parents to sign forms, but the forms might have implied that his or her child was gay.”
During its review process, the IRB pays special attention to projects involving prisoners, minors, pregnant women, mentally impaired people and other groups that are often risky to involve or contact. In order to recruit her subjects, Lowe is using a research technique called “snowball sampling,” where researchers rely on referrals from current subjects to find potential participants.
“I use that method because of the sensitive population that I’m working with,” said Lowe. “Snowball sampling is a way to [target certain subgroups] by assuming that someone who identifies in a certain way may know other people with that same identity.”
Senior psychology major Laura Niman partly relies on her subjects’ mothers for referrals. Her senior thesis is focusing on how infant cognitive development is affected by differences in socio-economic status.
“I’m looking at babies that are six, nine, and 12 months old, and most of the data is from six-month-olds,” said Niman. “I’ve had a little bit of trouble because there are a limited number of babies of the right age in Walla Walla. But I found that it’s helpful to ask people if they have any friends with babies of the same age.”
Niman was granted research funds to offer each participant a $20 gift certificate to Walmart. Candy, cookies, gift certificates and raffle drawings are common types of incentives offered to participants by student researchers. Professors have also offered students the chance to earn extra credit by participating in others’ experiments.
“All compensation needs to be indicated in the IRB proposal,” said Wally Herbranson, chair of the psychology department. “What they look out for is they don’t want the compensation to be coercive. If you’re giving away sports cars, you could probably do some pretty egregious stuff and students will put up with it. But if you’re giving away cookies, then students aren’t going to be in a position to continue with something they otherwise wouldn’t.”
Herbranson believes that most students are successful in finding enough participants for their theses, especially because Whitman students are so generous with their time. Interviewing mostly Whitman students, however, is not always ideal.
“I think [interviewing mostly Whitman students] kind of hurts the study because the people here are, no offense to us, all really similar,” said Xi. “We’re a similar age group, similar socio-economic status for the most part, and a lot of us have the same political background. It’s hard to generalize from that group, in my opinion. Luckily, a lot of the studies are designed to look at things that are applicable to everyone.”
Herbranson commented that social scientists are used to working with college students because they often constitute the largest available subject pool.
“There’s kind of an in-joke in psychology that says we know more about sophomore psychology majors than we know about the population of the world because those are the kinds of people that end up in the subject pool at big universities, and that’s where most of the research that gets published in psychology journals comes from,” said Herbranson.
Despite the challenges of finding subjects, Lowe has been pleasantly surprised with her results.
“I’ve actually had pretty good luck,” she said. “I thought people would be hesitant to talk about [certain] issues, but I guess it’s something that a lot of people want to talk about in their day-to-day lives but don’t have the opportunity to talk about it.”
Herbranson commented that research methods are likely to change over time.
“Standards do change. There’s certainly been research programs conducted in the distant past that would no longer be approved because the way we look at research has been a fluid concept; it changes over the years.”
