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Efficiency of Recruiting Methods for Reaching Monolingual Asians in the United States

*Hyunjoo Park, RTI International 
Mandy Sha, RTI International 

Keywords: Asian population, Cognitive interview, Recruitment

Limited English-speaking and immigrant populations are hard to reach, particularly when specific demographic characteristics are targeted for testing questionnaires in cognitive interviews.

Prior research (Liu et al., 2012) suggests that when recruiting monolingual Chinese and Korean populations, ethnic newspaper advertisements have the dominant advantage in reaching a larger number of respondents (“reach-out capacity”) while less time is spent by the recruiters (“time efficiency”). Word-of-mouth recruitment approach has the highest rate of rendering qualified respondents (“preference rate”). However, the demographic characteristics of participants differ by recruitment strategies (Park et al., 2011). This paper advances the literature by comparing four different recruitment strategies in terms of three efficiency measures (time efficiency, reach-out capacity, and preference rate) and evaluating how findings vary by language groups, recruitment cities, and recruiters’ individual characteristics.

Our study uses recruitment data collected from a cognitive interview project sponsored by the US Census Bureau. In order to test the American Community Survey (ACS) Language Assistance Guide with monolingual Korean and Chinese speakers, potential respondents were screened for eligibility and recruited through (1) in-language newspaper advertisement; (2) flyers at locations frequented by potential respondents; (3) online advertisement; and (4) word of mouth. More than 800 Chinese and Korean speakers with a diverse range of demographic characteristics were contacted.

We will investigate whether the prior findings on time efficiency, reach-out capacity, and preference rate can be replicated when the Korean and Chinese respondent recruitment data are analyzed separately. Further, we will evaluate how recruitment cities and recruiters who have regular access to ethnic communities contribute to the efficiency measures using the combined data as well as the separate Korean and Chinese respondent recruitment data.