Evaluating Two Common Strategies for Research Participant Recruitment Into Autism Studies: Observational Study.

BACKGROUND: Ongoing research is necessary to better understand the causes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), the developmental outcomes for individuals diagnosed with ASD, and the efficacy of the interventions. However, it is often difficult to recruit sufficient numbers of participants for studies, and despite the prevalence of ASD (currently estimated to affect 1 in 54 children), little research has focused on how to efficiently recruit participants with ASD. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of two different paid advertisements-social media and radio advertising-in recruiting participants for a study enrolling people with ASD and their family members by examining the number of participants enrolled, the cost per participant, and the geographic reach of each type of advertising. METHODS: We examined participant enrollment in a study following nonoverlapping paid advertisements on a popular FM radio station (aired in three cities across two states) and Facebook (six advertisements that ran in five cities across two states). The total paid investment in the radio campaign was $12,030 and that in the Facebook campaign was $2950. Following the advertising campaigns, 1391 participants in the study who were affiliated with the Houston, Texas, site received email invitations to participate in a brief survey about the ways in which they learned about the study (eg, social media, medical provider, website) and which of these were most influential in their decisions to participate; 374 (26.8%) of the participants completed this survey. RESULTS: Social media advertising outperformed radio in all three parameters examined by enrolling more participants (338 vs 149), with a lower average cost per participant ($8.73 vs $80.74) and a wider geographic reach, based on a comparison of the number of zip codes within and outside of Texas for questionnaire respondents who rated social media as the most influential method of contact (n=367, χ21=5.85, P=.02). Of the 374 survey participants, 139 (37.2%) reported that they had seen the study on social media prior to enrollment, while only 9 (2.4%) said they heard about it via radio. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings suggest that advertising on social media can efficiently reach a large pool of potential participants with ASD, increasing the likelihood of meeting study enrollment goals. Researchers should consider allocating at least some portion of recruitment dollars to social media platforms as a means of quickly and inexpensively reaching out to their target populations, including for studies with in-person procedures.

Exploring the contribution of motivation and experience in the postpubescent own-gender bias in face recognition.

The own-gender bias in face recognition has been hypothesized to be the result of extensive experience with own-gender faces, coupled with a motivation to process own-group faces more deeply than other-group faces. We test the effect of experience and motivation in four experiments employing standard old/new recognition paradigms. In Experiment 1, no own-gender recognition bias was observed following an attractiveness-rating encoding task regardless of school type (single- or mixed-sex). Experiment 2, which used a distinctiveness-rating encoding task, did find a significant own-gender bias for all groups of participants. Experiment 3 on adults found that the own-gender bias was not affected by self-reported contact with the other-gender, but the encoding task did moderate the size of the bias. Experiment 4 revealed that participants with an own-gender sexual orientation showed a stronger own-gender bias. These results indicate that motivational factors influence the own-gender bias whereas no evidence was found for perceptual experience. (PsycINFO Database Record

Spoon-to-cup fading as treatment for cup drinking in a child with intestinal failure.

We treated a child with intestinal failure who consumed solids on a spoon but not liquids from a cup. We used spoon-to-cup fading, which consisted of taping a spoon to a cup and then gradually moving the bowl of the spoon closer to the edge of the cup. Spoon-to-cup fading was effective for increasing consumption of liquids from a cup.