Queer considerations: Exploring the use of social media for research recruitment within LGBTQ communities

Abstract

The use of social media platforms (such as Facebook) for research recruitment has continued to increase, especially during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Social media enables researchers to reach diverse communities that often do not have their voices heard in research. Social media research recruitment, however, can pose risks to both potential participants and the researchers. This topic paper presents ethical considerations related to social media recruitment, and offers an example of harassment and hate speech risks when social media is used for research recruitment. We explore the implications of hate speech risks for ethical research.

Minority Stress and Loneliness in a Global Sample of Sexual Minority Adults: The Roles of Social Anxiety, Social Inhibition, and Community Involvement

“…Social media advertising has been used successfully in previous studies of hard-to-reach populations, including sexual minorities (King et al, 2014 ; Thornton et al, 2016 ). Although not without its risks and limitations (Littler & Joy, 2021 ), this method allows recruitment of LGBTQ sub-populations that are underrepresented in research, including older adults, those in non-Western and rural regions, and those not highly involved in the LGBTQ community. The latter is important because people higher in community involvement—who are often the primary source for minority stress research—may differ in meaningful ways from those who are less community-involved (e.g., in real or perceived exposure to minority stress, or motivation for participating in research; Kuyper et al, 2016 ; Meyer & Wilson, 2009 ).…”

‘That Sounds to Me Like You Are Making This Too Complicated …’: Reflections on a Social Media Recruitment Effort for a Study on Masculinities and Contraception

“…To assess why people targeted for RI recruitment were not eager to participate, we analysed comments posted in reply to our recruitment post on Reddit, a social network with a forum-style discussion structure (threads) that works with up-voting and down-voting contents in topic-based communities (sub-Reddits). The research community is divided on how one should approach data exploitation in online communities (Proferes et al, 2021) and how one should recruit in potentially marginalised and vulnerable online communities (Littler & Joy, 2021). However, given thati) our target community was very broad and we published our posts inside unspecific groups with large followings,ii) quotes were translated from the original German, making it much harder to track down the original phrasing,iii) quotes in neither English nor (original) German could be reversed-Google-searched,iv) we removed all usernames and other identifying or personal information in this publication,v) users on Reddit frequently choose fictional usernames and usually share no identifying personal information on their profiles,we concluded that participants’ confidentiality is not threatened and that the social media data at hand can be treated as secondary data.…”

Using Social Media to Recruit Seldom-Heard Groups: Reaching Women and Girls with Experience of Violence in Iran

“…Researchers facing challenges in participant recruitment, especially from "hard-toreach" or "seldom-heard" populations, are increasingly turning to innovative approaches, such as utilising social media for recruitment and online data collection (Sandhu et al 2023). This method has proven effective in reaching diverse and under-represented groups in research (Guillory et al 2018;Sandhu et al 2023), particularly amidst the COVID-19 pandemic (Littler and Joy 2021).…”