Researchers BEWARE! attrition and nonparticipation at large.

There are many obstacles in undertaking psychological burns research with children and adolescents, and the more useful longitudinal studies are particularly fraught with difficulty. This work introduces and discusses the problems of attrition and nonparticipation encountered in our attempt to use a rigorous design and methodology to study this population. The aim is to provide the impetus for a more thorough, detailed review of this problem.