What Makes A Bad Participant?

What makes a bad participant?

Over the course of conducting our study, we encounter hundreds of hopeful applicants, and then scores of participants who make it through the screening. However, there is always one, or two, or a few participants in a round of the study who exemplify someone who is difficult to work with in these circumstances.

The worst thing one can do during the outpatient portion of the study is to not show up. During the outpatient segment, participants are commuting to the lab from their homes several times a week. Once the participants are scheduled for outpatients, many things from physical examinations to drug dosages are carefully scheduled. A missed drug dose can put our schedule in jeopardy, or at least cause inconvenience for the researchers when trying to analyze the data. Being late is another big issue; since the day is scheduled very strictly, being late will cause inconvenience in having to reschedule all of the time points.

Learning ability is also another factor. There are quite a few tasks that the participants must do during the study, and while they aren't incredibly complicated, they still take some learning and understanding. We sometimes run into some difficulty with participants who do not have a strong math or literary background, and thus have a hard time completing some of the math battery tasks or understanding some of the surveys. We try our best to get these participants caught up and understanding, but we often run into patients who are simply unable to understand or complete the tasks. If this causes too much of a problem, we would have to let the patients go.

Another issue is attitude. It is almost unavoidable for the participants to be in a terrible mood when they're at the height of their cigarette and marijuana withdrawal. In monitoring the participant's conversations (which we do with obvious cameras and microphones in the social area. This seems to be a fact that they seem to forget, at least judging by some of the things they say...), we often encounter negative attitudes that may be harmful to the study. If one participant is talking about how terrible the study is, it may bring down the overall morale, which in turn may incite participants to stop cooperating. Additionally, sometimes rumors are started between the participants about something we may have said to them (or at least what they think we said to them), which may spread misinformation among the participants, interfering with the study.

Lying about information is another very big issue, an issue that raises some questions about how to go about human clinical trials. That may be a subject for a future post.

Many participants have shown some of these traits in one way or another. I suppose that our job as researchers is to minimize the damage that uncooperative behavior may cause.