Feasibility and Acceptability of Recruitment and Retention in a Remote Trial of Gatekeeper Training for Military Veterans
ABSTRACT
Background:
SAVE (Signs; Ask; Validate; Encourage) is a brief gatekeeper training designed to teach lay individuals how to identify and assist military veterans at risk for suicide. SAVE can be delivered asynchronously using an online video format, but no studies of effectiveness of SAVE exist.
Objective:
The aim of this project was to determine the feasibility and acceptability of recruitment and retention in a remote trial of SAVE.
Methods:
We conducted a social media campaign using sponsored Facebook posts (ads) to recruit veterans, including those outside the VA network of care, and their loved ones. Participants (N=214) were randomized to SAVE or a sham video training unrelated to suicide prevention and followed for six months. We also conducted qualitative interviews with a subgroup (n=15) and used a mixed methods framework to integrate findings.
Results:
At baseline, most participants were a family member or friend of a veteran (68.2%, or 146/214), and 47.7% (102/214) knew at least one veteran or servicemember who had died by suicide. Across both study arms, 73.8% (158/214) responded to at least three of six follow-up surveys and 72.4% completed follow-up (155/214) at six months. Themes from interviews indicated three barriers to study participation: generic posts, copy (ad text) referring to “research,” and Facebook as a platform. There were five facilitators to participation: audience segmentation focused on veterans’ family members and friends, an urgent call to action to help a veteran, prior exposure to suicide, emphasizing benefits of receiving training, and using a university as the campaign messenger.
Conclusions:
A social media campaign was a feasible and acceptable approach to recruit and retain participants—especially loved ones of veterans with prior exposure to suicide—for a fully remote trial of SAVE gatekeeper training. Several campaign strategies may be applied to further promote remote study participation in this population. Clinical Trial: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04565951; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04565951
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
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.