How do you Recruit and Retain a Prebirth Cohort? Lessons Learnt from Growing Up in New Zealand

Abstract

Growing Up in New Zealand, a longitudinal study following nearly 7,000 children, has faced some unique challenges in identifying, enrolling, and retaining a large and diverse antenatal cohort. Identification of a study region with population demographics that enabled enrollment of an appropriately diverse sample was required as was intensive community and participant engagement in order to promote the study. Complementary methods used included direct engagement with prospective participants and the community and indirect engagement via media. Thus far, retention rates above 95% have been achieved by maintaining a multimethod approach that includes valuing participants and building trusting relationships, strong brand recognition, community engagement, maintenance of participant contact and location records, ensuring high-quality interactions between the participants and the study, pretesting measures and methods prior to the main cohort, and using participant feedback to inform the measures and methods used in future waves of data collection.

Growing Up in New Zealand cohort alignment with all New Zealand births

“…So far, strategies to maximise retention across the diversity of participants have been successful. 17 The comparison of birth data reported here is just one example of how the cohort can be compared to routine national statistics. To date, data collection has been completed when the cohort children were aged nine months, 16 months, two years and 31 months.…”

Depression symptoms during pregnancy: Evidence from Growing Up in New Zealand

“…We completed our study of AD symptoms, risk and protective factors in a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse cohort of 5664 pregnant women who were participating in the Growing Up in New Zealand longitudinal study (Morton et al, 2012).…”

“…The Growing Up in New Zealand cohort of pregnant women was recruited to provide information that is broadly generalisable to all current NZ births (Morton et al, 2012). The women had a due date between 25th April 2009 and 25th March 2010 and lived in the geographical area where about one third of the NZ population lives, covered by three contiguous District Health Board regions (Morton et al, 2013).…”

“…Written informed consent was obtained from all participating women. Detailed descriptions of cohort study design and sample recruitment have been published previously (Morton et al, 2012(Morton et al, , 2013.…”

Policy translation for early childhood education and care: the Growing Up in New Zealand approach

“…All pregnant women who resided within this region and who had an estimated due date between 25th April 2009 and 25th March 2010 were eligible. A multi-faceted recruitment strategy was utilised with the goal of recruiting a sample broadly generalisable to the contemporary New Zealand national birth cohort (Morton et al 2012). Alignment of the enrolled cohort with the national birth cohort was confirmed (Morton et al 2015).…”