3. Getting Started

Actions for tracking and locating must be taken early in the design and implementation of an evaluation study to ensure low attrition. This section discusses such issues as budget considerations, setting up an effective tracking system, documenting the procedures, and actual tracking steps.

Budget Considerations

The cost of locating clients is, of course, a primary concern when budgeting for a follow-up study. The budget may make or break your success rate, so correct budgeting is vital. The budget required will in large part depend on whether your study design is prospective or retrospective (see Introduction ). For prospective studies, the budget for tracking and locating at follow-up can be markedly reduced because you will be able to get locator information at the time of recruitment and again at the intake interview. The intake interview is the time to ensure that interviewers get as much locating information as possible.

Retrospective studies that rely on public or treatment records for locating clients generally require a much larger budget for tracking and locating, since a single source of information is often all that is available.

As a rule of thumb, it is highly recommended that a dedicated tracker be hired at, at least, 25 percent time, unless your study sample is likely to be easy to find. This person, in concert with the study director, will make the decisions about when and how to proceed with various locating efforts. We estimate that an interviewer/tracker will spend about 10 minutes per client per contact possibility in locating efforts. That does not include doorknocking (i.e., field locating), which is very expensive in labor cost alone. Although many clients are found quickly, you will probably average around 20 attempts per client among all clients.

Other cost considerations include client payment. Payment can be offered in cash (the method preferred by most clients), checks, money orders, telephone calling cards, food vouchers, supermarket vouchers, treatment program vouchers, public transportation tokens or cards, groceries, various merchandise, and/or clothes. If cash is the chosen mode for client payment, it is usually necessary to have the client sign a receipt upon payment. Some form of payment can be an important incentive to get clients to agree to the follow-up interview. Clients selected at the time of intake, as in a prospective evaluation design, are more likely to participate in the follow-up if they have been informed in advance that there is a payment for the follow-up interview.

Other considerations are:

• Does your project need the study director's time to set up formal contacts with different agencies? If so, plan on allocating about 50-100 hours of that person's time for this, depending on the scope of the evaluation.

• How much do the various services cost that you want to access? For example is there a fee for obtaining information on arrest reports, Department of Motor Vehicle records, etc.? How pertinent to your client population are these records?

• What is the acceptable follow-up rate for your project? It probably will not be too costly to find 75 percent of the clients. Is that rate high enough? If not, each additional 5 percent you find will cost considerably more as more costly procedures are used and more person-hours are needed. How many clients can possibly be located through the least costly methods such as mail, telephone, and computer contact? These methods should be exhausted first.

• Does your funding agency allow follow-up by phone? If not, you need to allow for travel to other cities or states.

• How much time is there between the intake and the follow-up interviews? The longer the time, the more money you will need.

• Are you conducting the study in a large metropolitan area, such as Los Angeles or New York, or in a rural area? You need to consider the costs that may be unique to your location.

• In order to maximize your follow-up rate, all of the above considerations should be taken into account as you plan and implement the evaluation study.

Setting Up the Tracking System

Appoint a dedicated tracking coordinator. In order to ensure that interviewer/locators utilize proper and efficient locating techniques, it is important that one person be put in charge of coordinating the efforts for your project. This person should have locating experience or should be trained by an experienced locator. The money invested in this person is money well spent. The coordinator is in charge of all locating efforts, delegating tasks, and ensuring that the appropriate steps are taken at the appropriate time. This person is there to help when a locator gets stuck and also makes the final decision on whether to spend the extra effort to locate someone. It is essential that this person is sensitive to the needs of the trackers and the difficulties and frustrations involved in tracking clients, especially difficult clients. The coordinator should be highly involved at all levels of the tracking efforts−spending time tracking with the other trackers, making calls, etc. It is important that the staff feels supported and that the coordinator understands their experiences.

The tracking coordinator is also the liaison between the evaluation study and various agencies, and works with the evaluation director in establishing contact with new sources. The coordinator should assign files to locator/interviewers and review all the files on a at least a monthly basis. Trackers should not be overburdened with files, as that might lead to the tracker feeling overwhelmed. The coordinator should hold weekly meetings with all staff. During this meeting, trackers bring in their cases and review progress. This is the time to share ideas that have been successful as well as the ones that have proven unsuccessful. If a tracker has been unsuccessful with a client, it might help to reassign the files to a new tracker.

Finalize organizational decisions early. An important prerequisite to a successful tracking and locating effort is the scheduling of adequate time for planning and preparation well in advance of actual fieldwork. There are several decisions to make and procedures to develop before initiating the tracking and locating activities, including deciding whether to operate the tracking and locating effort from a field office or from the central administration or program office, obtaining Institutional Review Board Clearance and a Certificate of Confidentiality (see Chapter 2), obtaining clearance for interviews and/or location information from criminal justice agencies (see Section 5.2), and obtaining access to various databases (see Section 5.1).

Establish dedicated phone lines. Once the location of the operation is determined, the next step is to secure one or more dedicated telephone lines. The dedicated telephone line will be available expressly for incoming calls from clients and from others contacted in the effort to locate clients. The line is especially useful if the evaluation study is part of a larger drug services facility where confidentiality of the study could be compromised if the call were answered with a salutation naming the facility. This line should ring on all follow-up staff phones and should be answered with a neutral greeting (e.g., "UCLA Health Study").The phone line should be equipped with voice mail and a message that announces that collect calls are accepted; however, if the collect call is from an automated service, it will not be possible to leave a message that way. Establishing a toll-free "800" number is very useful and prevents phone charges from being a disincentive for parties returning locators' calls. Make sure that the information that shows up in the line's caller ID is neutral and consistent with the phone number and study name you are giving out.

Create appropriate stationery and business cards. To protect confidentiality, stationery must be neutral (not mentioning drugs, alcohol, treatment, or the name of a treatment agency). We use "UCLA Health Study" stationery and include our 800-number on it. Business cards should also be specific to the study and neutral.

Develop a tracking database. In order to automate tracking and locating tasks and to easily assess the status of a particular client, a database program such as FileMaker Pro, Access, or Quattro Pro is typically used. Information from the Locator Form is entered into the database upon intake. With such a program in place, it is possible to generate personalized letters, print address labels, flag cases approaching the eligibility date for the follow-up interview, and print client profiles for locators/interviewers to use in the field. The tracking database can be programmed to automate many of these tasks. Tracking staff must keep the database current, recording information such as a new address for the client, the client's prison or jail location, the date an interview was completed, and so forth. The database needn't have the level of detail described in the tracking log below, but information on the status of every client must be current. We use information from the tracking database during our weekly project meetings - it allows us to see how close we are to meeting our goals.

Create separate file folders. The next step in preparing for the implementation of the tracking and locating effort is to create a separate file folder for each client: a case file. Each case file will contain a Locator Form, a Tracking Log, database search results, and any miscellaneous materials regarding the client. (See Appendix A for examples.) When the locating efforts commence, the files are organized according to the status of the client, and then alphabetically sorted. The process begins with all client files having the same status of "Not activated." After the first follow-up letter is sent to the "best mailing address" on the Locator Form or Abstractor Form, the client's file is activated. Any contact or attempted contact with a client means a change to the case file on the client's status.

It might be helpful to arrange the files in these or similar categories:

• Contacted
• Scheduled
• No-Show
• Located, Not Interviewed
• Incarcerated
• Out-of-Area
• Out-of-State
• In Hospital/Treatment/Hospice
• Difficult to Locate
• Passive Refusal (try again later)
• Final Refusal
• Deceased

Documenting the Procedures

Staff must document all tracking activities in the specially created tracking file to be included in the case file for each client. On each client's tracking log:

• Record dates and descriptions of all actions taken
• Log in letters that are returned
• Log in new information on client
• Make notes on any new leads to follow

This file will document any correspondence sent, telephone attempts, street locating efforts, incoming calls, requests submitted to government agencies or other sources of information, and any other miscellaneous information that is discovered about the client (see sample logs in Appendix A). The documenting procedure is actually a process of constructing a personal history for a client. When a history is carefully constructed and documented, it can provide a tremendous wealth of information to locate the client. Upon reviewing a complete and current file, the fragmented bits of information may fall into place and new leads appear regarding a client's whereabouts. Additionally, keeping a client tracking and locating file complete and current reduces redundancy, helps to avoid bothering sources with unnecessary repeated contacts, and allows other staff members to work effectively with the file. At any time, a staff member not familiar with a specific case should be able to identify the next step in tracking a client based on the efforts described in the client file.

Tracking Steps

If you have plenty of lead time before the follow-up contact, the most cost-effective way to track clients is to thoroughly exhaust one, low-cost approach for all clients (e.g., mass mailings) before proceeding on to other approaches (e.g., telephone calls). In practice, however, this approach is not always the most prudent because it is impossible to predict which approach will be successful with a particular client. Therefore, multiple efforts must proceed simultaneously. We suggest that actions be performed in the "sets" listed below:

For all clients, first:

• Mail correspondence to all known addresses
• Call all phone numbers listed for client and named contacts
• Request DMV, arrest, and other available official records
• Search phone books and Web-based White Pages for updated telephone numbers and addresses of clients and all potential contacts
• Review local jail and prison inmate listings weekly

If all of the above are unsuccessful, then:

• Review returned correspondence for address updates
• Send an additional letter to any address from which mail was not returned
• Obtain more detailed records on prior treatment, arrests, or medical/psychiatric hospital stays to review for potential contact sources
• Review files from custody facilities to obtain a list of visitors to your client during periods of incarceration, then contact these people
• Submit credit report searches

After trying all the techniques listed above: Go doorknocking. Of course, all these steps may have to be repeated numerous times before you are successful. Be persistent!