Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Formative Research
Date Submitted: Apr 15, 2025
Date Accepted: Jan 22, 2026
A comparison of participant demographics across co-designed recruitment methods to two student mental health trials: A cross-sectional observational study.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Using social media platforms to recruit participants for research has been demonstrated to be a far-reaching and successful recruitment method, especially for young people. One of the cited benefits of social media in recruitment is maximising the diversity of the sample. Nurture-U is a university student mental health project ran across six universities in the UK.
Objective:
This paper provides a pragmatic depiction of co-designing and implementing a social media strategy to recruit university students to two mental health trials across all UK universities. In addition, a comparison of demographics of those recruited through social media compared to other recruitment methods was undertaken to identify if social media did increase the diversity of the sample.
Methods:
Our student advisory group (SAG) assisted in social media strategy, advising on content, platform and when to engage. We trialled different adverts and employed a descriptive analysis of advert reach, link clicks, website traffic and research recruitment using Meta/TikTok business data, Google Analytics, and REDCap software. Chi-square analyses were undertaken of 1097 students to compare the sample recruited via social media to those recruited by other methods.
Results:
We spent over £24000 on social media recruitment, which resulted in 35% of the overall recruitment numbers to the trials over a 12-month period. Through extensive trial and error, student advisor input, and market research, an Instagram advert led to success in participant recruitment. However, due to the transient nature of university life, this fluctuated over the academic year. There were significant differences in the samples recruited through social media and other methods on gender, sexual orientation, and age, but not on ethnicity or disability.
Conclusions:
Social media led to a more diverse population for our mental health trials, demonstrating its effectiveness in increasing the reach of research recruitment. Our key lessons learnt in recruiting through social media surround awareness of the student calendar when planning research in universities, widening recruitment windows where appropriate. Additionally, significant resources, both financial and staff time, is needed for strategic implementation of social media recruitment strategies. Clinical Trial: ISRCTN86795807 ; ISRCTN56784470
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.