Today I continued calling for the BMI study. I called about 75 different families and was not able to find any qualifying participants. During calling I came across two different new situations with upset parents. The first was with a mother whose son had died a couple years ago and needed to be removed from the participant list. I was very kind and professional and made sure she was not upset that we had contacted her. The second family I talked to was upset that she had not received follow-up information regarding the studies that she had participated in the past. She did not want to be removed from the data base but told me that she was probably not going to be interested in participant. I told her I would do my best to look into the previous studies she had and gave Josh her phone number to contact her later that day. This kind of taught me that you have to be prepared for all different situations when recruiting participants. I also coded another pilot study for the EFM validation study that Sam is running with Matt. We were unable to finish a portion of the coding because the file became "corrupt" on the server.
Sara P. 2-27-12
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Sounds like you handled it well. Unfortunately, we don't always get notice when a family loses a child, and it's an awkward situation to be in. Looks like you handled it with sensitivity. As for the other parent, there's not much we can do about how other labs handle sending results out. You can ask the family if they know what lab it was and offer to put them in touch with the PI. If it was our lab, you can remind them that we send out our newsletters annually, so while a child may have participated recently, it takes a while to bring those results together with other children's sessions and make a meaningful result. We try our best to maintain a good relationship with our participants even after they have left the lab, but sometimes families have different expectations of what we will provide. This is why experimenters tend to stress BEFORE the session that we are not clinicians, and that these are parts of large studies, some of which have been going on for over 6 years!