Pighills, Alison, Torgerson, David J., and Sheldon, Trevor (2009) Publicity does not increase recruitment to falls prevention trials: the results of two quasi-randomized trials. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 62 (12). pp. 1332-1335.

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Abstract

Objective: To test the effect of publicity on recruitment to a randomized trial. Recruitment is often poor in trials. Publicity within recruitment packs might be an inexpensive method of increasing recruitment. We tested this in two quasi-randomized trials.

Study Design: In a primary care setting, within the context of a randomized trial of falls prevention, we allocated participants to receive a newspaper article about the study with their information sheet. The first trial compared one newspaper article against no article; the second compared a more favorably written article against the original.

Results: In the first study 4,488 participants were allocated into two groups. The response rate was 102 and 97 in the intervention and control groups, respectively (4.55% vs. 4.32%, 95% confidence interval [CI]: −0.98, 1.43); the recruitment rate was 73 and 71, respectively, the difference not being statistically significant. In the second study 2,745 were allocated into two groups with a response rate of 75 and 69 for the control and intervention groups, respectively (5.46% vs. 5.03%, 95% CI: −1.24, 2.09); the recruitment rate was 57 and 54, respectively, the difference not being statistically significant.

Conclusion: These two large experiments revealed no evidence of effect of publicity on recruitment rates.

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