blog de notas de juan freire

A critical part of any ethnographic/design research project is recruiting the right participants for the study – they are the foundation on which the research is built. The default way of recruiting in the commercial research space is to use recruiting agencies to help connect the researcher with relevant participants – generating a list that is often fleshed out by contacts from the team’s extended social network. The ideal recruiting agency list-of-potential-participants contains hundreds of millions of entries and document every aspect of potential participant’s lives – what they are doing, who they are doing it with, the causes they feel passionate about, the brands they connect with, the music they listen to, the places they go – and all updated in real time. Thanks to social networking sites like Weibo, Facebook, Orkut and Mixithis ‘ideal list’ already exists, and comes with a built in mechanism – their advertising platform to engage participants and proximate participants to opt into the study.

The ability to recruit through extended social networks has always been an important part of the researcher’s toolkit – with varying degrees of success depending on the focus of the participants’ profiles, the physical and spiritual distance between the study location and the team, and the breadth of the team’s extended network. The internet has made the planet smaller, social networks more apparent – making remote studies that much easier to run. Today the tools to rapidly and consistently reach and screen participants in any part of the globe are in the hands of every internet connected researcher. My estimate is that 80 to 90% of current recruiting for design research/ethnographic studies (excluding focus groups) that is currently placed through recruiting agencies could from a skill and work-flow perspective, be carried out in-house. This internalising of an otherwise outsourced practice has a couple of costs, which in most cases are easily outweighed by numerous benefits.

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