I'm looking for resources for my methodology chapter. For a section of my research, I did not conduct it b/c I could get no one to participate. How do I write this up? I'm looking for examples or journal articles that I can reference to explain the how and the why besides the obvious, which is that no one was interested despite all of my attempts at recruitment.

Have you talked to your supervisor about whether or not this bit should be written up as research? I had to abandon an early part of my research proposal as it was clear the recruitment was not going to be straightforward and it was going to take too long, but I'm writing it up as 'suggestion for future research', rather than including it with the research I did. For the bits of my research that did go ahead, I'm going to include things like numbers of gatekeeping agencies I approached, number who were able to help, reasons given for not being able to help, etc.

They have requested that it go in there, as it was 7 months of trying to get it to work, otherwise I would have just ignored it completely. I understand the point, but trying to find anything in academic (that isn't clinical research) research that gives a foundation in how to explain failed research or research where there were a lack of responses seems to be nil (to me at least)!

It would be helpful to know who were your target participants? There may be something more specific in the literature related to this. For instance, I had issues getting participants from educational institutions and I found some papers related to challenges of recruiting from educational institutions specifically.

The target demographic was parents. I was to use the website mumsnet to get mothers (and by extension) fathers (families) to tell me their stories in regards to my particular topic. I couldn't get anyone to respond with interest despite having people worldwide tweeting/Facebooking etc the link to anyone and everyone I could think of. I had wanted a targeted geographical area but after a few weeks we realised nothing was happening and I would have taken stories from ANYONE who wanted to share. Nada.

In hindsight I could have done it a different way and gone after parents in another manner, but it had taken 7 months to get this approved through ethics and I just didn't have the time/energy to go through all of that again, especially when I was doing data collection for another phase of research at the time.

I will take a look at parent recruitment and see how that works out for me, thank you!