Schwartz Alan, Weiner Saul J, Harrod Molly
Department of Medical Education, University of Illinois at Chicago, (mc 591) 808 S. Wood St., 986 CME, Chicago, IL, 60612, USA.
VA Center of Innovation for Complex Chronic Healthcare, Jesse Brown VA Medical Center, Chicago, IL, USA.
Trials. 2024 Dec 18;25(1):821. doi: 10.1186/s13063-024-08674-w.
Monetary incentives are commonly used to help recruit trial participants. Some studies have found greater recruitment with larger incentives, while others have found smaller incentives more cost-effective in terms of cost per participant. As part of an implementation study, we compared the impact of four approaches to recruitment, three of which involved phone recruitment with varying financial incentives. Adding modest financial incentives reliably increased the recruitment ratio, and greater incentives increased recruitment more than smaller incentives. However, recruiters required less time to obtain agreement to participate when the greater incentive was offered, and these time savings made the greater incentive cost-saving relative to the smaller incentive and cost-effective relative to no incentive. Our results suggest the possibility of a "sweet spot" for financial incentives, and that trial designers should consider pilot-testing incentive levels in the context of their other recruitment costs to determine whether paying participants more may be cost-saving for trial sponsors.
金钱激励措施通常用于帮助招募试验参与者。一些研究发现，提供更大的激励能招募到更多参与者，而另一些研究则发现，就每位参与者的成本而言，较小的激励措施更具成本效益。作为一项实施研究的一部分，我们比较了四种招募方法的影响，其中三种方法涉及通过电话招募并给予不同的经济激励。增加适度的经济激励确实提高了招募率，而且较大的激励比较小的激励更能增加招募人数。然而，当提供较大激励时，招募人员获得参与同意所需的时间更少，而且这些时间节省使得较大激励相对于较小激励而言节省了成本，相对于不提供激励而言具有成本效益。我们的结果表明存在经济激励的“最佳点”的可能性，并且试验设计者应该在其他招募成本的背景下考虑对激励水平进行预测试，以确定向参与者支付更多报酬是否可能为试验赞助商节省成本。
