UCSUR’s Survey Research Program (SRP) has developed and actively maintains a local IRB-approved (PRO11060616) research registry currently containing approximately 9,000 regional residents with detailed socio-demographic and contact information who are willing to take part in research studies.  Participants are continually recruited from local population-based telephone surveys conducted by UCSUR.  This demographically diverse registry can be used in collaboration with SRP to cost-effectively recruit local participants for externally funded research projects, including repeated panel surveys.  

We recently added a series of enrollment questions that determine whether the participant is an unpaid family caregiver.  Many people need different kinds of help as they get older, or when they have a serious or long-term illness or disability. Most often the people who provide this help or care are family members, partners, or good friends. They are called family caregivers, using the term “family” broadly.  Since this is becoming more common among families, we have added a “caregiver” indicator to allow researchers to access these individuals for caregiver research.  Caregivers have also provided all of the registry demographics and geographic data described below.  We also collect the age of the care recipient, to allow for studies of specific caregiving sub-populations.  Thus far, we have enrolled approximately 1,000 local caregivers willing to be contacted for research studies. 

Contact Scott Beach to learn more about this resource.  The registry contains:​

Detailed contact information, including:

• name

• full address (for geo-specific targeting)

• telephone number(s)

• e-mail address (if available).​

Caregiving Data:

• caregivers
• recipient age

Socio-demographic profile, including:

• Age

• Gender

• Race

• Education level

• Household income

• Employment status

• Marital status

• Household composition (with gender and age of all household members)​

The registry is continually updated and refreshed with new members recruited from ongoing studies.  SRP also maintains regular contact (i.e., at least once per year) with members to assure that contact and demographic information is current.

Researchers can contract with SRP to gain access to registry participants for larger study recruitment or primary survey data collection.  The IRB protocol is structured such that only UCSUR personnel can directly contact registry participants.  No direct access is provided to external researchers.  The registry has been used to successfully and cost-effectively recruit for two UCSUR-initiated and four externally funded research projects in the past year.