What I learned about engaging academics in research
Recruiting academics to participate in research — whether through interviews, focus groups, or surveys — can be difficult. The number of times we tell each other “I’m busy!” is countless. So even when we’re motivated and willing, finding time to contribute to someone else’s project is hard. When I started this project on Narrative CVs, we knew recruitment would be challenging — but we didn’t expect it to be this difficult.
Initially, we took a straightforward approach: sending emails to colleagues and posting calls for participants on academic mailing lists. Recruitment was very slow. Then came an unexpected issue when we advertised the study on social media platforms. We received a lot of very quick sign-ups — for a moment, we thought we were incredibly lucky. A second later, we realised these were fake participants. We had heard about “impostor participants” before, but this was the first time we had to deal with it ourselves. It created additional work to verify the authenticity of participants and to quickly identify who was genuine and who was not. It also made us curious and we started reading more about this phenomenon, we learned a lot!
What finally helped recruitment was simple: talking to people. Our amazing project partners played a big role, and it was great to see how many people were willing to help by pointing us in the right direction or connecting us with others. In some cases, we still faced delays and struggled to reach our intended sample. This made us think that short projects (e.g., 1 year project) involving specific populations (e.g., researchers) are challenging because the timeframe is often too short.
What’s the lesson learned? Nothing revolutionary: talk to people. Don’t be afraid to reach out. Academics are busy, yes — but they are also generous. Also, when writing a proposal, think about a plan B, C, and D to manage unexpected challenges.