Child recruitment

Experimental design. This MRL is based on the results of the Seychelles Child Development Study (SCDS), a series of evaluations on a population in the Seychelles Islands. The chronic oral MRL for methylmercury is based upon the Seychelles Child Development Study (SCDS), in which over 700 mother-infant pairs have, to date, been followed and tested from parturition through 66 months of age (Davidson et al. 1998). The SCDS was conducted as a double-blind study and used maternal hair mercury as the index of fetal exposure. Enrollees were recruited by the head nurse/hospital midwife by asking the mothers if they wished to participate in the study when they arrived at the hospital for delivery. The first 779 who did not decline participation became the mothers in the study cohort. Of the initial 779 mothers enrolled in the study at parturition, 740 remained at the predetermined child testing age of 6.5 months,... 

Parents have different reasons for allowing their children to participate in clinical research. A researcher should understand these factors and take them into account in trial design and parent/patient education. The aim is to improve the recruitment rate, on the one hand, and parentsVpatients satisfaction, on the other. Less well-informed parents may misconstrue that their child will get better treatment or will get a novel treatment in a randomised trial and will be disappointed when the result or randomisation does not correspond to their perception. Fundamentally, such a misunderstanding threatens their ability to make an informed choice. 

Brocklehurst P (1994). Randomised controlled trials in perinatal medicine. 2 Recruitment of a pregnant woman or her newborn child into more than one trial. Br J Obstet Gynaecol 104 7 >5-7 >7. 

A second U.S. study cohort evaluated prospectively for lead versus neu-rocognitive and neurobehavioral relationships was that in the Cincinnati Lead Study. Pregnant women and the later prospective child cohort recruited into this study had relatively high PbB levels and correspondingly lower SES characteristics than individuals in the Boston group. The principal prospectively monitored outcomes for general neurocognitive development in this study series are contained in multiple reports Dietrich et al. (1987, 1991, 1992, 1993) and Ris et al. (2004). 

Achvarina, V., and Reich, S. (2006) No Place to Hide Refugees, Displaced Persons, and the Recruitment of Child Soldiers. International Security 31(1) 127-64. 

In this study, the children were all aged 66 months. Of the 1218 names on the birth records, 881 (72%) were unavailable because the family had moved, the child had died or had some serious mental or physical handicap. Of the remaining 337 families, 38 were not contacted for the same reasons as outlined for Study 1. Of the remaining 299 families, 23 were not in when the recruiter called back, 8 had children who were ill when testing was to have taken place, and 67 refused to take part. Of these refusers, 34 were interviewed and no significant differences were shown between them and the families who chose to take part. The final sample of 201 was made up of 110 boys and 91 girls. 

Evidence from our initial study of a model for school-based mental health services provided support for a broadly defined parental involvement program (Atkins, Adil, Jackson, Talbott, et al., 2001). Extensive efforts to recruit and engage families in services resulted in initial recruitment rates above 90%, and of those 60 families, 86% remained involved in services at 9-month follow-up (Atkins et al., 2001). Because only about half of the families attended one or more parent groups, and fewer than a third attended sessions regularly, all families received home-based services in addition to consultation with the child s teacher and other... 

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