Using different Facebook advertisements to recruit men for an online mental health study: Engagement and selection bias (original) (raw)
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Internet Interventions, 2016
Recent reports indicate that Facebook (FB) may facilitate recruitment of hard to reach participants into mental health research. The present study aimed to contribute to this emerging literature by exploring recruitment data from a recently completed trial of online treatment for symptoms of anxiety and depression that targeted Arab people. The present study compared traditional recruitment strategies such as media releases, emails, and print advertisements with Facebook strategies including boosting posts, promoting websites, events and FB public fan pages. The main outcomes of interest were the number of started applications and the time and cost per application associated with the FB and traditional recruitment strategies. A target sample of 350 was sought and a total of 81 participants applied to participate over the 42-week recruitment period. Overall, 86% of the resultant applications occurred via FB recruitment and a Poisson regression analysis indicated the FB strategies were more time-effective, recruiting participants 2.5 times faster than the traditional strategies. However, there were no differences in cost-effectiveness for FB ($US37 per participant) and traditional strategies ($US40 per participant). The findings of the current study add to existing literature detailing the value of FB recruitment strategies, alongside more traditional strategies, as a way of recruiting hard-to-reach populations for research. However, more research is needed to explore alternative and optimal strategies for the successful recruitment of hard to reach populations via FB and other online social media platforms.
JMIR research protocols, 2016
Recruiting participants for research studies can be difficult and costly. The popularity of social media platforms (eg, Facebook) has seen corresponding growth in the number of researchers turning to social networking sites and their embedded advertising frameworks to locate eligible participants for studies. Compared with traditional recruitment strategies such as print media, social media advertising has been shown to be favorable in terms of its reach (especially with hard-to-reach populations), cost effectiveness, and usability. However, to date, no studies have examined how participants recruited via social media progress through a study compared with those recruited using more traditional recruitment strategies. (1) Examine whether visiting the study website prior to being contacted by researchers creates self-screened participants who are more likely to progress through all study phases (eligible, enrolled, completed); (2) compare conversion percentages and cost effectiveness...
JMIR Mental Health, 2015
Background A depression-awareness campaign delivered through the Internet has been recommended as a public health approach that would enhance mental health literacy and encourage help-seeking attitudes. However, the outcomes of such a campaign remain understudied. Objective The main aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an online depression awareness campaign, which was informed by the theory of planned behavior, to encourage help-seeking attitudes for depression and to enhance mental health literacy in Hong Kong. The second aim was to examine click-through behaviors by varying the affective facial expressions of people in the Facebook advertisements. Methods Potential participants were recruited through Facebook advertisements, using either a happy or sad face illustration. Volunteer participants registered for the study by clicking on the advertisement and were invited to leave their personal email addresses to receive educational content about depression. The par...
JMIR Formative Research, 2022
Background Recruitment of diverse populations for health research studies remains a challenge. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these challenges by limiting in-person recruitment efforts and placing additional demands on potential participants. Social media, through the use of Facebook advertisements, has the potential to address recruitment challenges. However, existing reports are inconsistent with regard to the success of this strategy. Additionally, limited information is available about processes that can be used to increase the diversity of study participants. Objective A Qualtrics survey was fielded to ascertain women’s knowledge of and health care experiences related to breast density. This paper describes the process of using Facebook advertisements for recruitment and the effectiveness of various advertisement strategies. Methods Facebook advertisements were placed in 2 rounds between June and July 2020. During round 1, multiple combinations of headlines and interest ...
Social media recruitment for mental health research: A systematic review
Comprehensive Psychiatry, 2020
Background: Social media holds exciting promise for advancing mental health research recruitment, however, the extent and efficacy to which these platforms are currently in use are underexplored. Objective: A systematic review was conducted to characterize the current use and efficacy of social media in recruiting participants for mental health research. Method: A literature review was performed using MEDLINE, EMBASE, and PsychINFO. Only non-duplicative manuscripts written in the English language and published between 1/1/2004-3/31/2019 were selected for further screening. Data extracted included study type and design, participant inclusion criteria, social media platform, advertising strategy, final recruited sample size, recruitment location, year, monetary incentives, comparison to other recruitment methods if performed, and final cost per participant. Results: A total of 176 unique studies that used social media for mental health research recruitment were reviewed. The majority of studies were cross-sectional (62.5%) in design and recruited adults. Facebook was overwhelmingly the recruitment platform of choice (92.6%), with the use of paid advertisements being the predominant strategy (60.8%). Of the reviewed studies, substance abuse (43.8%) and mood disorders (15.3%) were the primary subjects of investigation. In 68.3% of studies, social media recruitment performed as well as or better than traditional recruitment methods in the number and cost of final enrolled participants. The majority of studies used Facebook for recruitment at a median cost per final recruited study participant of $19.47. In 55.6% of the studies, social media recruitment was the more cost-effective recruitment method when compared to traditional methods (e.g., referrals, mailing). Conclusion: Social media appears to be an effective and economical recruitment tool for mental health research. The platform raises methodological and privacy concerns not covered in current research regulations that warrant additional consideration.
College Participant Recruitment Through Facebook Ads: Is Anybody Listening?
2012
To combat cervical cancer, the United States public health policy has advocated Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination for all adolescent females. This female-only HPV vaccination campaign has failed to reach sufficiently protective uptake levels. New research describing strong associations between HPV and cancers afflicting both sexes, revised cost-effectiveness models, and the FDA licensure of a vaccine for men, has led to the inclusion of males into the U.S. HPV vaccination campaign. Including men in the ongoing campaign has raised new research questions and logistical challenges. Among those, is the challenge of how to effectively recruit men into HPV vaccine trials. Communication about HPV infection has been strongly linked with female cancers and suffers from sexual stigmatization. This study compared conventional recruitment of 18-25 year old men into a clinical HPV vaccination trial with recruitment through Facebook Ads™. Facebook Ads™ produced 20% of the study sample. Of the 44 men who first heard about the study through social sites, only 13 of these men also heard about the study through a conventional recruitment strategy, suggesting that conventional recruitment methods can be supplemented by social media recruitment. A larger than expected proportion of Facebook recruits were homosexual or bisexual (p=.02) and were also more active in social media (p=.02) than expected. The findings of this investigation suggest that Facebook and other social platforms could be a useful public health communication and recruitment tool for interventions or studies targeting 18-25 year old men, especially those who are homosexual or bisexual.
Facebook as a Recruitment Tool for Adolescent Health Research: A Systematic Review
2014
BACKGROUND: Researchers are increasingly using social media to recruit participants to surveys and clinical studies. However, the evidence of the efficacy and validity of adolescent recruitment through Facebook is yet to be established. OBJECTIVE: To conduct a systematic review of the literature on the use of Facebook to recruit adolescents for health research. DATA SOURCES: Nine electronic databases and reference lists were searched for articles published between 2004 and 2013. STUDY ELIGIBILITY CRITERIA: Studies were included in the review if: 1) participants were aged ≥10 to ≤18 years, 2) studies addressed a physical or mental health issue, 3) Facebook was identified as a recruitment tool, 4) recruitment details using Facebook were outlined in the methods section and considered in the discussion, or information was obtained by contacting the authors, 5) results revealed how many participants were recruited using Facebook, and 6) studies addressed how adolescent consent and/or parental consent was obtained. STUDY APPRAISALS AND SYNTHESIS METHODS: Titles, abstracts, and keywords were scanned and duplicates removed by 2 reviewers. Full text was evaluated for inclusion criteria, and 2 reviewers independently extracted data. RESULTS: The search resulted in 587 publications, of which 25 full-text papers were analyzed. Six studies met all the criteria for inclusion in the review. Three recruitment methods using Facebook was identified: 1) paid Facebook advertising, 2) use of the Facebook search tool, and 3) creation and use of a Facebook Page. CONCLUSIONS: Eligible studies described the use of paid Facebook advertising and Facebook as a search tool as methods to successfully recruit adolescent participants. Online and verbal consent was obtained from participants recruited from Facebook.
Facebook Ads Manager as a Recruitment Tool for an Online Health and Safety Survey (Preprint)
2020
BACKGROUND Social media websites have unprecedented levels of growth and usage over the past decade, with Facebook.com hosting 2.5 billion active users worldwide and over 200 million Americans. This population has been underutilized and understudied by the academic community as a resource for participant recruitment. OBJECTIVE We explore the efficacy of Facebook.com recruitment for an online agricultural health and safety survey METHODS We undertook a pilot study lasting one week on Facebook utilizing their integrated, targeted advertising platform – Facebook Ads Manager. We posted three advertisements depicting varying levels of agricultural safety adoption leading to a brief survey on farm demographics and safety attitudes. We targeted our advertisements towards farm mothers aged 21-50 in the United States and determined cost-effectiveness and potential biases. RESULTS Three, one-week advertisements were listed concurrently for $294 USD, total. We reached over 40,000 users and gat...
Proceedings of the International Conference on Internet Studies (NETs2013), 2013
Facebook’s global reach suggests good potential for recruiting research participants and collecting objective behavioral data for cross-cultural research. Previous literature suggests the usefulness of Facebook advertisements to recruit participants in single-country studies. However, Facebook advert use in multi-country studies has not yet been reported. Nor are there any reports about soliciting Facebook user data (via Facebook applications) using Facebook advertisements. This paper contributes to this gap in Internet research literature, reporting the effectiveness of Facebook advertisements to recruit participants, and solicit anonymized Facebook user data, in a 20-country study about privacy concern on Facebook. In 7 days, 399 Facebook users from 18 countries responded to country-targeted advertisements in 13 languages. Response rates (ratio of advert clicks to valid responses) per country varied from 0% up to 14%. Overall, two-thirds of countries’ response rates were below 5%. We conclude for multi-national studies, Facebook advertisements may have potential for simple participant recruitment for surveys, but have limitations for soliciting Facebook user data. For user data collection, methods such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and snowball sampling may be more effective, but can be limited in their international reach.