Abstract
Evaluations of school-based interventions and prevention programs typically require parental consent for students to participate. In school-based efforts, program evaluators may have limited access to parents and considerable effort is required to obtain signed consent. This issue is particularly salient when conducting research in under-resourced, urban schools, where parent involvement in the school setting may be somewhat limited. The aims of this article were to (a) examine the published school-based prevention and intervention literature to assess the state of the field in terms of consent procedures and participation rates; and (b) describe two examples of health promotion studies that used multi-component, partnership-based strategies in urban schools to encourage communication among children, their parents, and researchers. The purpose of the case studies was to generate hypotheses to advance the science related to school-based participant recruitment for research studies. Of nearly 500 studies reviewed, only 11.5% reported both consent procedures and participation rates. Studies using active consent procedures had a mean participation rate of 65.5% (range: 11–100%). This article highlights the need for researchers to report consent procedures and participation rates and describes partnership-based strategies used to enroll students into two urban, school-based health promotion studies.
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Acknowledgments
The projects described were supported by three grants from the National Institute of Health (grant numbers: K23MH001728, K23HD047480, and R34MH072982). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Mental Health. The authors are appreciative of the artistic creativity of Jannon Farkis and Kaila Wilcox, who collaborated in the design of the boards used in Case Example 1, and Michael Grossman, who collaborated in the design of the cartoon boards in Case Example 2.
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Blom-Hoffman, J., Leff, S.S., Franko, D.L. et al. Consent Procedures and Participation Rates in School-Based Intervention and Prevention Research: Using a Multi-Component, Partnership-Based Approach to Recruit Participants. School Mental Health 1, 3–15 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12310-008-9000-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12310-008-9000-7