Participant recruiting for focus groups in health research: a meta-research study

Background: Focus groups (FGs) are an established method in health research to capture the different perspectives on a particular research question. The extent to which they are effective depends, not least, on the composition of the participants. This study aimed to investigate how published FG studies plan and conduct the recruitment of study participants. We looked at which kind of information are reported about recruitment and what this says about the actual recruitment plans and practices in terms of its quality. Data collection: We conducted a systematic search of FG studies in PubMed and Web of Science (January 2022 and October 2024) published between 2018-2024 and randomly selected half of the 153 eligible publications. We used an MS-Excel based text extraction sheet to collect all relevant recruitment information from each study. This included bibliographic information (first author, year, journal, country), information on the recruitment process (how was the recruiting done, by whom, when, with what aim, etc.) and information on the reporting and quality assurance (experience of the researchers who recruited FG participants, use of guidance, patient-public involvement, use of reporting checklists, informed consent, CoI). The data were extracted from the full texts of each included study and analysed by three authors (Cosima John, Simon Wallraf, Jonas Lander). We then coded the extracted text passages using key words and summarised the findings descriptively.