What are the best survey methods for the development and retention of participants in research studies?

I'm trying to find the best method of conducting a survey for community members to be involved and informed about clinical research so that their responses can help future research and/or they will be inspired to pursue a health- related career.

What are the best survey methods for the development and retention of participants in research studies?
I worked on a research study where we used an online survey instrument and had tremendous success with it. Now, I'm liberal arts so I don't know all the specifics of programming (we had a tech guy set it up for us), but the software was very user-friendly and once we set it up and harvested the emails we wanted to use, it sent them out in mass quantities. We could log on and track changes; it even had options for creating graphs and other data organizers directly from the raw data. Of course it could perform some statistical functions that were way over my head as well!





Long story short: I think an online survey would go over very well. It's convenient for participants and easy for you as the researcher to view results.





Hope this helps!