Community Connections

Background
Research Participants Across the Lifespan (PALS) is a database project that connects older members of the community (aged 60+) with research activities at Penn State. In March 2020, PALS had to pause research in order to transition from in-person to virtual testing.

Stakeholder Conversations
I organized several conversations with key stakeholders to define success metrics (community satisfaction, researcher satisfaction, and database growth), propose a research plan, and establish touch bases to ensure continuous stakeholder-researcher alignment. The following information directly results from these conversations.

Goals
-Facilitate community interest in research participation through digital mediums.
-Allow researchers to connect and engage with community members.

Objectives
-Create a digital space for both researchers and older community members to uphold research connections during the COVID-19 pandemic.
-Accommodate older community members who lack experience using digital platforms.
-Accommodate researchers who were unaccustomed to virtual recruitment and participant connection.

Two-Pronged Approach
-With community members: Understand desirability towards participating in research a) during a global pandemic, and b) in an online setting
-With Penn State researchers: Provide recommendations for what resources should be used to host participant interaction, data, and payment

Methodology
-With community members: Wrote and designed two exploratory surveys to determine 1. Community willingness to participate in research, and 2. Target audience technological familiarity and aptitudes. The surveys were written in Qualtrics and Google Forms, respectively, and disseminated to community members via MailChimp.
-With Penn State researchers: Wrote and designed a survey to determine what sort of technical capabilities would be needed for hosting experiments online. The survey was written in Google Forms and disseminated to researchers via an internal listserv.

Synthesis and Analysis
All three surveys were independently subjected to analysis. Qualitative questions were submitted to a content analysis. Ordinal data produced descriptive statistics or were subjected to a Pearson correlation.

Results
Results suggest both community members and Penn State researchers desire online research opportunities. For community members, an ideal research platform would be easy to use, would not require a login, and provided the option to get paid either online or through the mail. They also wished to be informed about studies they had previously participated in. For researchers, the research platform would be accessible, have reliable data storage, and was free/affordable.

Recommendations
1. Enhance the PALS website to make it more user-friendly and informative. This would allow Penn State researchers have a consistent place to post study opportunities. Community members would be able to express their interest in a posted study using a simple, embedded form.
2. Publish a regular newsletter highlighting past research to inform community members on the impact of their previous participation, as well as incentivize future participation from community members.

Shareout
Results and recommendation were delivered to key stakeholders via PowerPoint and low-fidelity mock-ups.