Posted by TILEd
19 September 2025“Participation data” below tracks actual participation as a percentage of peak demonstration of interest (as of 2025/09/19). The chart also includes the proportion of participants who signed up voluntarily following recruitment calls and have no prior connection to the author. This contributes to generating more credible results and ensuring greater diversity in gathered data.
Recruitment was paused early because of the high response rate. This was unfortunately necessary because of limited resources available for collecting data as sole researcher in this particular project. Limiting the numbers ensures that anyone who did sign up is guaranteed personalised correspondence, care, and in-depth analysis of their data in a secure environment (i.e., no use of AI that could end up feeding data to train LLMs).
The next chart “Subscription conversion to participation” shows what is called ‘attrition’. Adopting an ethical approach to research places care to participants who take the time to sign up ahead of excessive over-recruiting to guarantee numbers. In practice this means that when the pre-defined maximum threshold was reached, I had to pause recruitment, knowing that the risk was that the attrition rate would exceed 50%.
My forecast number of participants was set at 24-27, with a 50% buffer. This gives a minimum limit of 12 and maximum of 54. Therefore, when the number of consent forms collected reached 54, I had to take the difficult decision to open a ‘reserve’ list to ‘pause’ active recruitment. Fortunately some participants still signed up to be on the reserve list, which allows me to have a larger buffer of participants ready to step in if attrition exceeds 50%. It is still early days, and this page will track actual participation. Details about ethical considerations, recruitment, and how thresholds were calculated will all be part of my final thesis.
This page will track actual participation. Details about recruitment and how the thresholds were calculated will be written up in my final thesis.
The snapshot below illustrates breadth of participation in the UTILE Project in terms of language coverage, as of 01/09/2025. Actual participation is tracked in the progress chart above.
