Recruiting Spousal Caregivers of People Living With Alzheimer's or a Related Dementia for Caregiver Intervention Research: Lessons Learned From a Feasibility Study

This paper documents a nationwide community outreach effort to enroll spousal caregivers into an online dementia intervention study. The research team made hundreds of cold calls and emails to organizations across the U.S., ultimately finding that it took an average of 36.5 contact attempts per recruitment site for every one caregiver enrolled. Despite being time-intensive, this low-cost approach may offer a viable pathway for research teams lacking access to medical centers or physician referral networks to successfully recruit spousal dementia caregivers.

Henderson A, et al. Recruiting Spousal Caregivers of People Living With Alzheimer's or a Related Dementia for Caregiver Intervention Research: Lessons Learned From a Feasibility Study . J Appl Gerontol. 2025 Dec;44(12):2045-2049. doi: 10.1177/07334648251326621. Epub 2025 Apr 3.

Recruit & Retain Participants 2026-03-05T00:00:00Z Research Articles