Given all the challenges we’ve been facing in recruiting participants for our study online, we decided to give in-person recruitment a try. Sachet and Shreya went to Delhi University’s North Campus along with two enumerators to see if it would be possible to recruit study participants by approaching college students on campus. Since Shreya studied at Delhi University as an undergraduate, she knew her way around well. Our goal was to get people to fill out our screening survey to collect basic demographic information and offer respondents the opportunity to indicate which parts of the study they would like to participate in: the anonymous online survey, the college students experiment or the parent-child experiment.
Delhi University, locally known as DU, is an undergraduate and post-graduate institution run by the Central Government of India. The University comprising 91 colleges spread across the city, with an enrollment of over 258,000 undergraduate students. North Campus is home to sixteen DU colleges where undergraduate students are enrolled full-time. In addition to the traditional “full-time” colleges, North Campus also includes the School of Open Learning, where students can enroll in correspondence courses so they can receive an undergraduate qualification through distance education.
We decided to spend some time in the public spaces frequented by DU students around North Campus and try our luck with recruiting them to participate in our study. Our first stop was outside the college gates of Miranda House, an all-girls college. In 2023, Miranda House was declared the “best” DU college for the seventh consecutive year by the National Institutional Ranking Framework ratings released by India’s education ministry. Conveniently for us, there are several food stalls on the pavement outside Miranda House where students spend their lunch break. As luck would have it, our enumerators were able to recruit 5 people for our study within the first 45 minutes! After struggling with online recruitment for the last several weeks, we were feeling more optimistic after this initial success with in-person recruitment.
Next, the team went to the Faculty of Arts, which is home to the Departments of Arabic, English, Germanic and Romance Studies, Psychology, and Hindi among others. The Faculty of Arts features a scenic red-brick seating area and a lawn, frequented by undergraduate students studying at the Shri Ram College of Commerce and Daulat Ram College which are right across the road as well as other students. We managed to recruit a few more people who also offered to share their friends’ phone numbers with our enumerators so we could send them the link to the screening survey as well.
Our last stop was to the café and food stalls in and around the Delhi School of Economics, one of the most prestigious post-graduate institutions in the country. Since it is located close to several undergraduate colleges, we found that the café was full of students and made plans to return here for recruitment in the future.
The university campus was buzzing with activity with the upcoming elections for the Delhi University Students Union. While we were walking around, we saw campaign processions for both leading student parties, the ABVP (affiliated with India’s ruling party BJP) and the NSUI (affiliated with the leading opposition party, Congress). Quite a few of the students we approached to participate in the screening survey said they were busy with election campaigning work. Despite this, we were able to recruit around 10 students in the 3 hours we spent on campus, some of whom promised to share the survey with their friends. Once things settle down, we are optimistic we will be able to recruit more people for the study. Overall, it was a very productive field visit, and helped us make concrete plans on how to proceed with recruitment. See our next blog post for some key takeaways!
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