134: Challenges with Recruiting Youth in the Modern Age: Phishing, Scamming, and Cyber-Attacks, Oh My!

Recruiting youth is crucial to incorporating their perspectives in addressing challenges that affect them. However, the modern age has challenged classical recruitment techniques which previously yielded fruitful results. Our evaluators recently employed several recruitment techniques to interview youth for two separate studies. One study recruited schools to access their student body, while the other study directly recruited youth via community-based organizations. Both studies, with the goal of interviewing youth, encountered contemporary challenges. Recruiting schools uncovered distrust and skepticism given phishing scams and cyber-attacks, and difficulties in accessing contact information. Recruiting youth via community-based organizations resulted in participant misrepresentation and inclusion of ineligible participants. This poster presents solutions and practical strategies to address the modern challenges evaluators face when recruiting youth. We share key barriers encountered in recent studies and highlight approaches to overcoming obstacles such as distrust, misrepresentation, and access limitations. Attendees will gain actionable insights and tools to enhance youth recruitment efforts in today’s evolving landscape.

Viktoriya Petrenko; Michele Sadler