Beyond the challenge to research integrity: imposter participation in incentivised qualitative research and its impact on community engagement

ABSTRACT

Participant recruitment for qualitative research often offers incentives (honoraria; financial compensation) to increase participation and to recognise lived expertise and time involved in research. While not necessarily a new concern for survey and other quantitative based research, ‘spam', ‘bot', and other inauthentic forms of research participation has rarely been an apparent issue for qualitative research, given it often involves levels of interaction with potential participants prior to the conduct of in-depth interviews and other methods of data generation. This is no longer the case. A troubling new occurrence has meant that recruitment calls for qualitative research with incentives on public-facing social media have attracted ‘imposter’ expressions of interest and research participation. In this commentary, we explore this challenge that goes beyond research integrity. In particular, we consider the risks of employing strategies to screen for legitimate participants and the importance of building trust and maintaining community engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Qualitative research
• marginalised communities
• imposter participants
• incentivised research
• research integrity
• community engagement
• trust

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.