Accepted for/Published in: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Mar 15, 2022
Date Accepted: Jun 15, 2022
Social Media Use for Research Participant Recruitment: An Integrative Literature Review.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Social media tools have provided health researchers with the opportunity to engage with communities and groups in a non-conventional way to recruit participants for health research. Using social media to advertise research opportunities and recruit participants facilitates accessibility to participants from broad geographical areas and diverse populations. However, there is little guidance provided by ethics review boards for researchers to effectively employ this recruitment method in their research.
Objective:
This study sought to explore the literature on the use of social media for participant recruitment for research studies and identify best practices for recruiting participants in this way.
Methods:
An integrative review approach was used to synthesize the literature. Five health sciences databases, namely Embase (Ovid), Medline (Ovid and EBSCOhost), PsycInfo (Ovid), Scopus (Elsevier), and CINAHL Plus with Full Text (EBSCOhost), were searched using predefined keywords and inclusion/exclusion criteria. The initial search was conducted in October 2020 and updated in February 2022. Descriptive and content analysis were applied to synthesize results and findings were presented in narrative and tabular format.
Results:
A total of 96 records were included in this review, 83 from the initial search and 13 from the updated search. Publication year ranged between 2011 and 2022, with most publications (66.0%) from the USA. Regarding recruitment strategy, 45.0% of studies exclusively used social media, whereas 51.0% used social media in conjunction with other strategies. Of note, 36.4% (n=35) of these studies involved hard-to-reach populations. Findings also revealed the use of social media is a cost-effective and efficient strategy for recruiting research participants. Despite the expanded use across different populations, there is limited participation of seniors in social media recruitment.
Conclusions:
This review provided important insights on current utilization of social media for health research participant recruitment. Ethics boards and research support services in academic institutions are encouraged to explicitly provide researchers with guidance on the use of social media for health research participant recruitment.
Citation
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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.