Acceptability of a mobile sensing application to characterize community integration among homeless-experienced veterans.

Mobile sensing applications that collect active, Ecological Momentary Assessment data, and passive, Global Positioning System data provide reliable, longitudinal assessments of community integration. Ensuring their acceptability by vulnerable populations is warranted. Acceptability-related perceptions of a mobile sensing application were gathered via focus groups with homeless-experienced Veterans with serious mental illness (n = 19) and individual interviews with providers (n = 5) to inform subsequent application tailoring and testing. Rapid assessment generated structured summaries and matrix analyses integrated participant data. Active data collection was deemed noninvasive, with more concerns of passive data "ending up in the wrong hands." Providers recommended clear descriptions and promotion of choice to navigate privacy concerns and guardedness. Participants felt the application possessed clinical value for enhancing patient-provider interactions and community integration efforts. Overall, participants found application features acceptable and expressed Veterans' willingness to engage in research using mobile sensing technology. Recommendations to enhance acceptability are discussed.

Facilitating Development Research: Suggestions for Recruiting and Re-Recruiting Children and Families.

Recruiting children and families for research studies can be challenging, and re-recruiting former participants for longitudinal research can be even more difficult, especially when a study was not prospectively designed to encompass continuous data collection. In this article, we explain how researchers can set up initial studies to potentially facilitate later waves of data collection; locate former study participants using newer, often digital, tools; schedule families using recruitment phone/email/mail scripts that highlight the many benefits to continued study participation; and confirm appointments with other digital tools. We draw from prior methodological and longitudinal pieces to provide suggestions to others wishing to re-recruit families for longitudinal studies. In addition, we draw upon our own experience conducting a non-prospective longitudinal study 6 years after an educational intervention, in which we successfully re-located 122 (90%) and interviewed 101 of 136 (83% of the located sample and 74% of the full original sample) parents and their early adolescent children. Although the majority of participants were recruited via original contact information (especially phone numbers), using a range of strategies to recruit (e.g., search engines focused on contact information, social media) and motivate participation (e.g., multifaceted phone/email/mail scheduling scripts, flexibility in location and means of participation) yielded a more desirable sample size at relatively low costs.