In-home ethnographies: children with allergies

Our client, a European management consultancy specialising in human sciences, asked us to recruit and arrange four-hour in-home ethnographies with children of different ages who suffered from various allergies and their parents.

Each child needed to be between the ages of 5-22 years old and be currently under the care of a healthcare professional for managing their allergies. Potential diagnoses included respiratory allergies such as allergic rhinitis and allergic asthma, or both (covering a mix of allergy types including grass pollen allergy, house dust mite allergy, ragweed pollen allergy, and tree pollen allergy).

We were asked to recruit a mix of treatment status’ including those currently on AIT (Allergen Immunotherapy – a type of allergy medication prescribed by HCPs), those who have previously tried AIT, and those who have never tried AIT. We were also asked to recruit based on a mix of engagement levels with AIT treatment options, from low enagement to high engagement with AIT.

The FieldworkHub team managed to recruit these participants, despite the fact that the incidence rate for children with severe allergies is quite low, by expanding outreach across additional social media channels (including local Facebook groups). Despite limited experience amongst the population in each market with AIT, we managed a full recruit in Denmark, France, and Germany.

Each participant was heavily vetted and asked to provide evidence that a healthcare professional had prescribed the specialised medication to the child taking part in the research. Many participants were not aware that their medication was known as AIT, referring to it with informal names, which meant we had to add an extra element of vetting to ensure they could give valuable feedback for our client.

Our team arranged each in-home interview, taking into account our client’s travel schedule and the time taken for our client to travel between each the participants’ homse. We encouraged the client to field at weekends (to best suit parent and child’s busy schedules). We also had a tight timeline to recruit such a niche profile, and our client was very pleased that we were able to meet it.