Sex education programs for youth are often designed to promote positive sexual and reproductive health (SRH) behaviors by giving youth the knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy to make healthy decisions about sexual activity and contraceptive use. Rigorous testing of these and other adolescent-serving programs through randomized controlled trials—including follow-up after program participation—helps identify which interventions effectively support positive outcomes. While high response rates on long-term follow-up surveys are critical to ensuring the quality and validity of these evaluations, many researchers and program implementers struggle to reach adolescents to complete surveys several months after programming ends.
Ensure that youth know who is contacting them and why.
When we reach out to participants for the MWB long-term follow-up survey, it’s been nine months since programming ended so it’s important that participants are expecting to hear from us. During program sessions—especially the final one—curriculum facilitators remind youth about the follow-up survey, highlight the $25 incentive for completing it, and explain who will be contacting them and when. After programming ends, we send automated monthly reminders with information about the final survey.
When it is time for the follow-up survey, facilitators reach out directly to participants to schedule in-person survey sessions. For youth completing the survey remotely, text messages with survey links include program-specific details, such as the facilitator’s name or program location, to jog participants’ memory and build trust.
Be persistent about outreach and use a variety of methods.
Reaching youth for the follow-up survey often requires multiple attempts. With approval from our Institutional Review Board, we contact youth in-person, by text, and by phone up to 10 times over the course of 4-6 weeks. While we typically begin with an in-person survey session, many participants are unable (or choose not) to attend; we follow up with these youth via text message. Since many see the message but are not able to complete the survey right away, we send additional reminders at different times of day to increase the chance that they’ll see the text and complete the survey when convenient. If there is still no response after two additional texts, we switch to phone calls. Sometimes we ask different staff members—including curriculum facilitators—to reach out, another tactic that has improved our response rates.