Cover: Recruitment and Retention of Homeless Youth in a Substance Use and HIV-risk Reduction Program

Recruitment and Retention of Homeless Youth in a Substance Use and HIV-risk Reduction Program

Published in: Field Methods [Epub October 2017]. doi: 10.1177/1525822X17728346

Posted on RAND.org on October 13, 2017

by Rick Garvey, Eric R. Pedersen, Elizabeth J. D'Amico, Brett Ewing, Joan S. Tucker

Conducting intervention studies with homeless populations can be difficult, particularly in terms of retaining participants across multiple sessions and locating them for subsequent follow-up assessments. Homeless youth are even more challenging to engage due to substance use, mental health problems, wariness of authority figures, and frequent relocations. This article describes methods used to successfully recruit a sample of 200 homeless youth from two drop-in centers in Los Angeles, engage them in a four-session substance use and sexual risk reduction program (79% of youth attended multiple sessions), and retain 91% of the full sample at a three-month follow-up assessment. Our experience indicates that utilizing structured project materials and having a small dedicated staff are essential to recruitment and retention efforts for intervention studies with homeless youth. Using these and other nontraditional methods are likely necessary to engage this at-risk yet hard-to-reach population.

This report is part of the RAND Corporation External publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.