Short Trainings on Methods for Recruiting, Sampling, and Counting Hard-to-Reach Populations: The H2R Training Program

Behavioral and social sciences researchers continue to struggle to reach, sample, count, engage and retain participants from socially disadvantaged groups, or hard-to-reach (H2R) populations. Hard-to-reach populations are often those experiencing health disparities for many diseases and conditions. Such populations include individuals experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity, those living with chronic mental illness, out-of-school youth, gang-involved individuals, street children, people who use drugs, and many others. There are many reasons why these groups are not fully represented or included in behavioral, social sciences, and clinical research. One reason is the lack of training on state-of-the-art methodologies to sample hard-to-reach populations and the advance statistical skills to analyze complex survey data within formal training programs. Moreover, the advanced methods needed to estimate their numbers are not taught in conventional behavioral, public health, and social sciences degree programs. These fundamental skills are needed to advance multiple lines of research to end health disparities, to be more inclusive of all populations in research, and to efficiently obtain samples of hard-to-reach populations in large enough numbers necessary for statistically powerful study designs. Many innovations for engaging, recruiting, and sampling hard-to-reach populations originate from HIV research but remain underutilized in other areas of behavioral and social sciences research. This H2R training program will capitalize on our >15 years of research with hard-to-reach populations at risk for HIV, and a recent successful initiative, the Sampling Knowledge Hub at UCSF, to establish a core of short courses, strengthen mentorship, and initiate lines of research among hard-to-reach populations. Participants in the H2R program (both students and mentors) will be drawn from university students and researchers, public health practitioners in health departments, and colleagues at other institutions engaged in research or health service delivery.