Hello Nanyondo,
Let me share with you what we always do when we have a new study, to avoid those kind of rumors from the study or potential participants as the most of the come up with such stories, we first make sure that CAB have been involved in protocol inputs before it finalized. Before we start recruitment in the recruitments sites that are chosen, we train the local authorities from the recruitment areas, the we do general education where men and women are invited, then we go back for the recruitment of potential participants. Those who are invited for the recruitment sessions, most of them are from those who had come for the general education on the research. During our recruitment session, we do power point presentation with the information about the studies we are going to do, after presentation and answering the questions, you invite one by one to meet individually for prescreening using prescreening check list. This is to minimize the number of participants who would come at the site and be excluded from the sites. We have found this very important in term of finance and less time that would be used by research team.
Rumors will still exist, but with approach is very easy to handle them, as you will be having support from all those people who you trained. Sometimes rumours may occur in the community, and they resolve between them selves and you get to know later what happened. who resolved it and she/he did, or if they do not manage, they call you.
Regarding media, make sure that you have in you CAB, 1 or 2 members from different media, it is so important. There is time that we got a problem of a study that was discontinued, as the news were in international radio, it affected us. To use social media, we had to pay, almost 6 .000$ and we ended up not paying even 1$.
Make sure to have a good relationship with your line Ministry, even if we do have members from media, it was not enough, because our line Ministry had to write a letter asking media to assist us. That all I would share with you.
