Research Plus Me amplifies and accelerates the research studies of two ASU graduate students

Recruiting participants for a study can require significant time, money and resources. Thanks to ASU’s Research Plus Me platform, graduate students have a new, no-cost resource for participant recruitment! Two PhD students in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering demonstrate the transformative potential of Research Plus Me. They are accelerating and diversifying their research – all while reducing time and cost! 

Read about their experiences below; then, watch this tutorial to add your study, or contact the development team to learn more at info@researchplus.me.

Jessica Lee is a PhD student in Human Systems Engineering. She started recruiting through R+ME on 8/8/2023. Her responses below describe her recruitment experiences from August 8 to September 23, 2023. Her study, “Decision Making Research Study,” endeavors to understand people’s decision-making in a morally related task. 

Immediately after posting my study on R+ME, I had consistent daily sign-ups. I published my study pretty early during R+ME’s launch. During those first couple of days, I would get one or two sign-ups a day, and then by the end, when I received all the participants I needed, I would receive four, five, or even six participants a day! Without R+ME, I could not have finished my data collection as quickly as I did! R+ME also allowed me access to a wider variety of participants. I would get students, faculty members, and ASU staff, which improves the diversity of age, background, and life experiences. 

R+ME provides ASU researchers with a competitive advantage because it opens the participant pool to more than just students within a specific program. Before R+ME, graduate students were limited to recruiting from the 101 courses within their program, but now we have access to students, faculty, and staff from the entire university. Not only does this improve numbers and the ability to collect data faster, but it also improves the quality of data by recruiting a more diverse (and hopefully representative) sample of the general population in the world.

Abdullah Mamun is a PhD student in Computer Science. He started recruiting through R+ME on 8/23/2023. His responses below describe his recruitment experiences from August 23 to September 22, 2023. His study, “Activity and Stress Data Collection for Machine Learning Algorithm Design,” endeavors to collect sensor data that will be used to develop machine learning algorithms.

R+ME has helped us get a lot more responses than before. Our user study will recruit 20 participants, counting those who have enrolled or completed the study. We received 30 new responses in our screening survey within the first month of advertising the study on R+ME. We have also observed more diversity in the enrolled participants regarding race and gender. Previously, our main recruitment methods were word of mouth and distributing flyers on campus. The previous method was time-consuming and needed to get a reasonable number of responses in return. 

This has undoubtedly created new opportunities for us [graduate students]. We considered spending money on advertising the user study when we needed more responses. But since R+ME is helping us connect to the potential volunteers without cost, we can spend the money to buy the necessary equipment for the lab. R+ME also benefits me as a PhD student. R+ME will save months to complete the project and my PhD earlier.

For more information on Research Plus Me, review the website or contact info@researchplus.me.