Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jun 1, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 3, 2018 - Jul 29, 2018
Date Accepted: Dec 10, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Using paid and free Facebook methods to recruit Australian parents to an online work-family survey: An evaluation
ABSTRACT
Background:
The prevalence of social media makes it a viable alternative to ‘traditional’ offline methods of recruiting and engaging participants in health research. Despite burgeoning use and interest, few studies have rigorously evaluated its effectiveness and feasibility in terms of recruitment costs, retention rates, and sample representativeness.
Objective:
This study aimed to determine the feasibility of using Facebook to recruit employed Australian parents to an online survey about managing work and family demands, specifically to examine: (i) the cost-effectiveness of Facebook recruitment; (ii) the retention rate and demographic characteristics of parents who returned to complete a follow-up survey 6 weeks later; and (iii) the representativeness of the sample, compared to a population-based cohort of parents.
Methods:
Recruitment was conducted using 20 paid Facebook advertising campaigns, together with free advertising in the form of posts on relevant Facebook pages.
Results:
Recruitment strategies together resulted in 6,653 ‘clicks’ on the survey, from which 5,378 parents consented to participate, with a full-survey completion rate of 86.7% (n = 4,665). Of those who completed the survey, 85.8% (n = 4,009) agreed to be re-contacted, with 57.8% (n = 2,317/4,009) completing the follow-up survey (i.e. 43.1% (n = 2,317/5,378) of parents who consented to the initial survey). Paid Facebook advertising recruited nearly 75% of the sample at AU$2.32 per completed survey (AU$7,969 spent, 3,440 surveys completed). Compared to a population-based sample, participants at baseline were more likely to be university educated (p<.001), experience greater work-family conflict (p<.001) and psychological distress (p<.001), and were less likely to be born outside Australia (p<.001) or live in a disadvantaged neighbourhood (p<.001).
Conclusions:
Facebook provided a feasible, rapid method to recruit a large national sample of parents for health research. However, some sample biases were observed and should be considered when recruiting participants via Facebook. Retention of participants at 6-8 week follow-up was less than half the initial sample; this may reflect limited ongoing participant engagement for those recruited through social media, compared to face-to-face. Clinical Trial: N/A
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.