The Participant Recruitment and Management Core, consisting of a full-time Coordinator and the Core Director, was designed from the ground up to provide services to assist Center investigators in the following ways: (1) The identification and recruitment of participants, (2) Management of contacts with participants in existing studies, and (3) Provide training in human subjects and act as a liaison between investigators, the local institutional review board (IRB) and human subject consortiums. PARC has established the necessary infrastructure to meet these aims. Specifically, PARC has designed a number of databases geared towards targeting households for recruitment and keeping track of individuals'participation in Center projects, as well as a database of regional organizations that can assist in participant recruitment either as recruitment sites or as resources for targeting likely participants. PARC also assists Center investigators'recruitment efforts by providing demography services to target specific geographical areas that would result in more efficient recruiting. Furthermore, PARC maintains regular contact with past participants through regular newsletter and birthday card mailings, and is able to employ a number of tracking methods to find """"""""lost"""""""" households, thus maximizing participant retention. Finally, PARC brings together Center investigators and staff for workshops on current participant targeting and recruitment strategies and the latest developments in human subject policies. These specialized services are often not fundable through R01 mechanisms and are not provided elsewhere. For the future, PARC will expand the services provided under each aim during the next funding cycle to explore, implement, and provide guidelines to investigators on use of electronic outlets for recruitment and retention of participants as well as primary data collection and the human subjects protection issues associated with each of those uses. In addition, recruitment efforts during the next funding cycle will provide an increased focus on recruitment of populations with communication disorders, especially adult populations, to facilitate the pursuit of new research efforts by existing faculty. PARC works collaboratively with the DEEC and ATT cores in developing the data management systems for integrative science.
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