As a team, we are really pleased to announce that we finished recruitment on 10th June, which is ahead of schedule! We started recruitment in November 2023, and have now reached our target of enrolling 70 young people in our project.
What does this mean?
Firstly, this means that we will not be inviting any more young people to join this research.
Secondly, it means that our last group of young people are now accessing either the ‘Understanding You, Discovering You’ online sessions, or ‘Care as Usual’. All other participants are now in the ‘follow-up’ stage of the study. This means they are finished with accessing support through the study and are now receiving their online questionnaires. These questionnaires help us understand how each young person continues to feel after accessing support.
Finally, it means that we have started to interview participants online, about their experience of taking part in our study. This will provide really useful feedback so we can improve our research procedures for any future studies.
Reflections on the recruitment process:
The participants in our study were recruited through the following channels: autism charities, research networks (e.g. at Universities) and parents’ networks (local and autism-specific). Our recruitment process was made much easier by the help we received from our charity partners, from which we recruited most of our sample. These charity partners were Ambitious About Autism, Autistica and National Autistic Society (NAS).
We spoke to Ben, our project manager from Ambitious About Autism, to understand a little more about how recruitment worked from his side.
Ben: “Our Ambitious Youth Network was a huge recruitment channel for us, which includes about 1000 autistic young people. Talk About Autism is also our parent/carer network, with 3,500 members.
"Posting regularly on these networks, for example on their social media channels, helped sustain recruitment. We have scheduled regular posts on social media and have always had quite an active community engaging with our posts, which is great. We also have the odd event, conference or network meeting, which provides another opportunity to promote the ATAG study.
“There is clearly such a need and demand for post-diagnostic support for autistic young people, so it felt very easy to find young people willing to support this research. That being said, at Ambitious about Autism we are so grateful to all the young people and parents/carers who are so engaged in our work and took part in ATAG. So, a big thank you to any of you who are reading this!”
Reflections on diversity and inclusion
When planning the participant recruitment for this study, we were conscious that certain demographic groups are often underrepresented in autism research, for example, those from lower income backgrounds. As a result, we tried hard to recruit participants from a wide range of backgrounds. We want to know if ‘Understanding You, Discovering You’ is an appropriate option for young people of all backgrounds and experiences.
We paid close attention to the backgrounds of young people we were getting from each recruitment channel, and found our most representative sample came from parent networks (i.e. participants who heard about the study from their parents, rather than directly from charities or research centres).
This is something we will be exploring when we interview participants, where we will discuss with them how they found out about our study, where else it would be helpful to advertise in the future, and how this could improve awareness of our study in under-represented groups.
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