As people signed up for the groups in the couple of weeks before they started, and during the first couple of weeks they were in session, some participants began to try to recruit their friends and family members to join in. The new recruits came to see me more or less willingly, depending on the persuasive powers of the participant bringing them in. The following examples gave me some insight into the difficulty I was having.
One participant brought in her adult son and his partner, because “They were sitting
around at home doing nothing,
” and she thought it would be good for them. I went
over the consent form with them, invited them to stay for the session, and arranged
to do the interview and test afterwards. As it happened, both had been competent in
math in their previous schooling, and one had always liked it. Even though they
joined the group late, they continued to participate until the end.
Another participant brought two young men in, her nephew and his friend. She thought it would be good for them, and told me they wanted to come. The three arrived about ten minutes before the group was scheduled to start. I spent about five minutes with the two young men, explained the consent form, invited them to stay for the session and remain afterwards to do the preliminary interview and test and get their honoraria. They both agreed to do so. I remarked that there was about five minutes left before the session would begin, and they had time to help themselves to coffee or go out for a smoke if they wanted. They said they would go out for a smoke, and vanished, never to come back. My impression at the time was that they were more interested in the honorarium than the group, but even the thought of money was not enough to get them to sit in a two-hour session, take the test and talk about math.
A third participant brought her friend along to be interviewed and tested, which I did. The friend had a history of failure and frustration in school math, hated it still, and came to only one group session.
At the end of a session, about a week after her group started, one of the participants lamented to me that the group was so small. She said she was really enjoying the group activities, and had been talking it up amongst her friends, but that no one she knew wanted to join; as soon as they heard about the test, they said, “No way!” I knew that she had a good job and family income, and assumed that her friends were in the same situation. Thinking that they would not be tempted by the honorarium I was offering, I asked her if she thought her friends would come to write the test and do the interview for $100. She replied that she didn’t think they would come for any amount of money.
I tried for several months to recruit participants at the Growing Together Child and Parent Society, which operates a child care centre next door to the alternate high school. It was difficult to recruit participants at this site, although the director of the Centre was enthusiastic and very interested in making the group available for the parents she worked with, many of whom attend the alternate high school. In September I spoke for about 10 minutes at an assembly at the school, but no one there was interested in participating, nor did posters and encouragement from the director have any results. In November, long after the other groups started, I did a “sample” group session at the day care for any parents who wanted to come; this was not part of the research, and no one was interviewed or tested; they were simply invited to come and have some fun learning math activities they could do with their kids.