Online and Offline Recruitment of Young Women for a Longitudinal Health Survey: Findings From the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health 1989-95 Cohort

Abstract

BackgroundIn 2012, we set out to recruit a cohort of at least 10,000 women aged 18-23 from across Australia. With recent research demonstrating the inadequacy of traditional approaches to recruiting women in this age group, we elected to conduct open recruiting.ObjectiveOur aim was to report on the overall success of open recruiting and to evaluate the relative success of a variety of recruitment methods in terms of numbers and demographics.MethodsWe used referrals, Facebook, formal advertising, and incentives in order to recruit the cohort.ResultsIn all, 17,069 women were recruited for the longitudinal online survey, from 54,685 initiated surveys. Of these women, most (69.94%, n=11,799) who joined the longitudinal cohort were recruited via Facebook, 12.72% (n=2145) via the fashion promotion, 7.02% (n=1184) by referral, 4.9% (n=831) via other Web activities, and 5.4% (n=910) via traditional media.ConclusionsFacebook was by far the most successful strategy, enrolling a cohort of women with a similar profile to the population of Australian women in terms of age, area of residence, and relationship status. Women recruited via fashion promotion were the least representative. All strategies underrepresented less educated women—a finding that is consistent with more traditional means of recruiting. In conclusion, flexibility in recruitment design, embracing new and traditional media, adopting a dynamic responsive approach, and monitoring the results of recruiting in terms of sample composition and number recruited led to the successful establishment of a new cohort.

Participant Recruitment and Engagement in Automated eHealth Trial Registration: Challenges and Opportunities for Recruiting Women Who Experience Violence

“…Interestingly, we estimate that if we had had administrative capacity to monitor high flows of participants into the trial, by running a blitz of ads across New Zealand every 6 weeks, we might have achieved our sample size within 6 months. Our challenges and opportunities experience is similar to that reported by Loxton et al [53], where the average number of daily responses for recruiting young women to the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health increased 5-fold with the introduction of targeted Facebook advertisements. The current I-DECIDE Australian trial is also using Facebook and achieving expected recruitment rates [10].…”

Using Facebook ads with traditional paper mailings to recruit adolescent girls for a clinical trial

“…Facebook advertising can be more cost-effective and time-efficient than other internet recruitment methods (Loxton et al, 2015; Ramo & Prochaska, 2012; Ramo, Rodriguez, Chavez, Sommer, & Prochaska, 2014). Studies have used Facebook to successfully recruit adult participants (Batterham, 2014; Nelson, Hughes, Oakes, Pankow, & Kulasingam, 2014) as well as adolescent participants (Altshuler, Storey, & Prager, 2015; Chu & Snider, 2013; Ellis et al, 2012; Fenner et al, 2012; Gilligan, Kypri, & Bourke, 2014; Mustanski, Greene, Ryan, & Whitton, 2015).…”

Recruiting Hard-to-Reach Populations for Survey Research: Using Facebook and Instagram Advertisements and In-Person Intercept in LGBT Bars and Nightclubs to Recruit LGBT Young Adults (Preprint)

“…A second strategy that has become popular for recruiting HTR populations for survey research is the use of targeted ads on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter [29,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. Social media platforms possess massive quantities of user data that allow for highly specific targeting of ads to HTR populations on multiple features, such as age, gender, location, interests, and relationship preferences (women interested in women, women interested in women and men, men interested in men, men interested in women and men).…”

“…Social media platforms possess massive quantities of user data that allow for highly specific targeting of ads to HTR populations on multiple features, such as age, gender, location, interests, and relationship preferences (women interested in women, women interested in women and men, men interested in men, men interested in women and men). A growing number of studies have successfully recruited HTR populations via social media, including young adult and adolescent smokers in the United States [29,[31][32], adult ecigarette users [35], adult gay men [33,[38][39], gay and bisexual youth [30], adolescent and young adult women in Australia [37,40], and HIVpositive adults in the United States [34].…”