Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Mar 10, 2025
Date Accepted: Oct 14, 2025
Recruiting and Retaining Military Veterans with PTSD and/or Gambling Harm for mHealth Interventions: Leveraging Social Media and Crowdsourcing
ABSTRACT
Background:
Emerging evidence indicates that military veterans are at increased risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) compared to the general population. PTSD is often comorbid with harmful and problematic patterns of gambling and together can represent a treatment challenge. Behavioural therapies such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) show promise in treating these disorders, especially if combined with mobile health (mHealth) interventions to circumvent the known help-seeking barriers faced by veterans. To date, however, recruitment for mHealth interventions has been challenging and may impact intervention feasibility.
Objective:
Here, we describe strategies used to recruit UK military veterans with comorbid PTSD and harmful gambling to a smartphone-based digital intervention, “ACT Vet”.
Methods:
Several strategies were used such as social media (Facebook) advertising, online participant recruitment platforms, project-specific website building, collaboration with veterans’ charities and organisations, and incentives.
Results:
Results showed that over 27 days, recruitment through Facebook accounted for 21 eligible veterans (seven unpaid, 14 paid advertising), while Prolific accounted for 50. Additional strategies recruited eight eligible veterans. In total, 79 eligible military veterans were recruited for ACT Vet, with 25 completing the full programme. However, difficulties such as low advertisement conversion rate, participant and data attrition occurred throughout the study.
Conclusions:
Our findings illustrate the effectiveness of social media and online platform-based initiatives in recruiting veterans with PTSD and harmful gambling. We conclude by recommending that future research should consider establishing an online presence for effective digital intervention recruitment with diverse branding to attract representative samples of veterans for mHealth research.
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© 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.