Recruitment strategies for British South Asians in 5 depression trials: A mixed method study

In the United Kingdom, ethnic minority group's particularly British South Asian women have higher rates of depression than their white counterparts. Despite this they remain under represented in mental health trials. Whilst the US legislation mandates the inclusion of ethnic minorities into research, there are no similar initiatives in the UK. Barriers in recruiting these hard to reach ethnic groups are cited as major reasons behind this under representation. Once these barriers are encountered it becomes a challenge for the researchers to overcome them. As there is paucity of research in this specific area through this paper we want to share our strategies in recruiting British South Asians thus encouraging other researchers to consider ethnic minority inclusion into research.

Our published systematic review on the barriers to recruitment of ethnic minority participants into mental health research developed a typology of thirty three ethnic recruitment barriers described under five themes. We aimed to find strategies to overcome these barriers from five depression trials for British South Asians conducted by our research group. Firstly we extracted data on recruitment strategies from the published papers. Later researchers involved in these five trials formed a working group to add to these extracted strategies. Finally these strategies were matched to the individual barriers described in the typology.

Multiple recruitment strategies were described by the researchers. These strategies were matched to all but two recruitment barriers related to psychopathology/substance misuse by the participants and paucity of healthcare related resources. Multiple strategies were found to be effective against each barrier and appropriate ones could be selected by the researchers after considering available resources at hand.

Findings from this paper have implications for the design of recruitment strategies for hard to recruit ethnic minority groups to health care research. There is need for wider training and support of researchers to give them the skills to recruit these ethnic groups. Further development and evaluation of these strategies will lead to increased recruitment accruals.