Our experience with recruiting for in-depth interviews is that there is a fair amount of ‘craft’ knowledge and anecdotal evidence regarding effective participant recruitment, but much of this evidence has yet to be formally collected and assessed This discussion will be helpful to anyone using mixed methods approaches that include surveys and in-depth interviews (IDIs). We discuss results, impact, and implications for recruiting strategies

1. Ethnographies of
energy: Recruiting
participants for in-
home interviews
Energy Extraction: Ethnography, Science,
Sustainability Panel
Society for Applied Anthropology Annual
Meeting
April, 2018
Philadelphia

2. Cybernetic
Research
Across
California
• Our California Energy Commission funded
project explores the emotional relationships
consumers have with their personal technology
• Our goal is a more nuanced understanding of
the role emotions surrounding technology play
in energy consumption
• How does technology mediate energy
consumption, and what does it mean to
people?

3. Cybersensitives
Cybersensitives are more
viscerally responsive to
technological interventions
than peers in cohorts
organized by class, gender,
neighborhood, age, or
income stratification.
01
We believe that people with
stronger emotional
attachments to their devices
(phones, tablet, laptops,
wearables) will have higher
energy savings when
exposed to their energy
consumption information
via said device.
02
Evidence for this can be
found here
http://indiciaconsulting.com
/downloads/Indicia-EPIC-
Task-Deliverable-5-
Cybersensitive-Electricity-
Consumption-Patterns.pdf
03

4. Ethnographic
Methodology
• Focus on recruitment strategies for interviews
around cybersensitivity in Marin County, CA.
• Our experience with recruiting for in-depth
interviews is that there is a fair amount of ‘craft’
knowledge and anecdotal evidence regarding
effective participant recruitment, but much of this
evidence has yet to be formally collected and
assessed
• This discussion will be helpful to anyone using mixed
methods approaches that include surveys and in-
depth interviews (IDIs).
• We discuss results, impact, and implications for
recruiting strategies

5. Screener
Survey
• We developed a screener survey to recruit
people to take part in the research
• Questions about device ownership, usage,
attitudes towards technology and energy
consumption.
• We accepted anyone willing into the IDI pool,
but this survey allowed us to conduct
preliminary stratification on respondents
• We later cross-tabulated survey responses
with interview data for a close grained look at
participants’ perspectives

6. Marin Clean
Energy
• Marin Clean Energy is the project’s local
utility partner in Northern California.
MCE is a local, non-profit energy
provider serving Marin County, City of
Richmond, and adjacent areas in
northern California
• MCE agreed to include information on
the project and the screener survey link
in three electronic newsletters.

7. Recruitment channels and tracking
We recruited
respondents through our
local utility partner Marin
Clean Energy, the
California Sierra Club, a
proprietary Constant
Contact email list, and
social media.
01
We recruited
respondents
electronically via
announcements,
banners,
advertisements, or
emails.
02
We tracked each of
these individual
recruitment methods
through unique web
links to the screener
survey.
03

8. Social Media
• We used Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
and NextDoor for recruitment outreach.
• We used social media outlets because
they are free, public-facing, and have a
high potential for pass-along
recruitment (i.e. snowball sampling).
• Marin Clean Energy also promoted our
research and the link to the screener
survey through their social media
channels, including Facebook and
Twitter.

9. Social Media Results
• The highest number of likes and click-throughs
we received was on a Facebook post with a
picture of a squirrel on a pumpkin.
• Even so, people drawn to the squirrel picture
did not produce many survey takers or
interview participants.
• Social media, though it gave us a lot of
exposure and ‘likes,’ gave us very little in the
way of survey completion, and nothing in terms
of interviews.

10. Incentives and
motivation
• In early 2016, to accelerate recruitment, we
shifted from a non-incentivized approach to
offering a small incentive ($25 USD Amazon gift
card).
• Curious whether we would identify response
rate differences between groups when offered
an extrinsic motivation via an incentive—$25
USD gift card in this project—and those relying
on intrinsic motivations, such as
environmentalist stances, altruism, or civic
pride.
• We announced the incentive with our email and
newsletter campaigns as well as through the
social media outlets.

11. Landing page
• We directed potential respondents to a
landing page on Indicia Consulting’s
website
• This landing page provided the screener
survey link and briefly described the in-
home interview process.
• This page also described that
respondents that completed in-home
interviews would receive an incentive
($25 Amazon gift card).

13. Incentives and
impact on
recruitment
• Click rates for October 2015 email campaigns
ran between 2.8 and 4.2%
• The March 2016 email with incentive returned a
measly .7% click rate.
• Yet, despite the much lower click rate,
participants left their contact information on
the screener survey at the same rate as the
earlier emails had elicited (64%).
• Further, the conversion rate from screener
survey participant to in-home interview was
three times as high for the third email
compared to the first (43% vs 13%) .

14. Takeaways
from
incentives
• The small cash incentives offered during
recruitment did not affect the rate or
percentage of people taking the screener
survey.
• However, offering small cash incentives did
affect the conversion rate of people from survey
participant to in-home interviewee.
• The presence of incentives in social media
campaigns did not produce greater
participation than email campaigns deployed
without incentives, but where an established
relationship between sender and recipient
existed previously.

15. Conclusions
• The team explored different channels
(online, face-to-face), media (digital,
paper) platforms (email, social media),
messages (civic, environmental), and
reward types (intrinsic vs. extrinsic) to
reach out to potential participants.
• None of these are directly comparable,
and the numbers are small, but the
outcomes gave us plenty to think about.

16. Conclusions
In terms of platforms, email out-
performed social media with
respect to response rates and
interview sign-ups, even though
social media impressions reached
far more people.
01
The most effective means of
recruiting participants for in-home
interviews was via channels that
take advantage of a pre-existing,
positive relationship.
02

17. Indiciaconsulting.com
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info@indiciaconsulting.com
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