Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Mar 9, 2022
Date Accepted: Jul 25, 2022
Assessing the feasibility of studying awareness of a digital health campaign on Facebook: Comparing young adult subsamples
ABSTRACT
Background:
Mass media campaigns for preventive health messaging have been shown to be effective through years of research. However, there is less research for the effectiveness of campaigns on digital media, which is currently how youth and young adults are primarily consuming media. In particular, there has yet to be a platform that can accurately assess exposure to digital messaging in a real-life setting.
Objective:
This study examines the feasibility of Virtual Lab to conduct a study on exposure to a media campaign within Facebook.
Methods:
Virtual Lab is a survey platform that was used to recruit and survey participants within Facebook and Facebook Messenger, respectively. We created a Facebook Business Account with two Facebook Pages, one for recruitment and disseminating the survey, and one for serving the target ads. Pre- and post-surveys were administered via Facebook Messenger one week apart. During this time, the target ads were served to participants who completed the pre-survey. Survey data were compared between those who completed both pre- and post-surveys and those who only completed the pre-survey, i.e., lost to follow-up. The demographics of the complete cases were also compared to the US Census data.
Results:
A total of 375 Facebook users between 18 and 24 years old met eligibility requirements and consented to the study, which consisted of complete cases (n=234) and those lost to follow-up (n=141). A few differences between complete cases and lost to follow-up were observed. For gender, there were 40.2% males and 59.4% females for complete cases and 44.0% males and 50.4% females for lost to follow-up (P=.003). Differences were also observed for e-cigarette use status, where lost to follow-up consisted of more current users and fewer past and never users than that of complete cases (P=.01).
Conclusions:
The use of Virtual Lab yielded a diverse sample, quickly and cost-effectively. This study suggests feasibility of the platform for studies of media campaign exposure within Facebook.
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.