When Incentives Feel Wrong

Hello Curious Learner,

This is Maira, owner and principal researcher at Quali Q.

Let’s imagine a scenario. You submit your research project to your university ethics board. You plan to compensate your participants for their time and participation in your research with a 25-dollar gift card to a local grocery store, which is an accepted practice in your area. You have no issues with this piece of your ethics application, and your project moves forward. Yay, you can now start recruitment!

You organize everything for your first focus group, aiming to have no more than eight participants. You are all set, two recorders in hand, someone to help you take notes and debrief after, printed consents and then…20 people show up, at the same time. What? Sounds crazy? Maybe, but it did happen to me during my PhD.

I was working with migrant, low-income mothers and for them 25 dollars was A LOT of money. So much so that the word about the focus group got out in the community, and 20 women showed up to participate. What did I do? First, I panicked a bit... I could not say, 12 of you are dismissed and need to leave now. Yet, it helped a ton that I was not alone. The research coordinator and I decided to divide the group, and conduct not one but two focus groups. We had food to offer them (snacks are usually a good strategy to make people comfortable) so women who were waiting enjoyed something to eat and a good conversation.

We conducted two focus groups, and to do that we had two ask fewer questions than initially planned. When were done, and in the car leaving the research setting, we debriefed. We talked about the discomfort of the whole situation, the power we felt we had because of our 25-dollar gift cards, the problems we would have with our research budget, and what to do moving forward.

We discussed what happened with our supervisor and community stakeholders who were part of the research, and decided to lower our incentives to 10-dollar gift cards. We were not going to turn any mother away so the consequence to that decision was lower incentives. Women still came and participated in our focus groups, we had over 80 mothers in 10 focus groups.

It was incredible but stressful at times. I realized 10 dollars, and the need for social interactions went a long way with our participants. That realization was not always an easy one to emotionally process but with a supportive team, I did it and loved it.

This post was getting too long. If you are curious about something I did not mention here, just ask.

Talk soon,

Maira