Recruiting fathers for parenting research using online advertising campaigns: Evidence from an Australian study

Abstract

Background Fathers are underrepresented in parenting and child health research. Given there is a strong link between fathers' parenting behaviour and children's well‐being, there is a need to find ways to engage fathers more consistently. The current short report provides information and learnings about recruiting fathers online using social media. Results are drawn from an Australian study that aimed to recruit roughly equal numbers of mothers and fathers to participate in a survey about employment, parenting, and health, using online advertising. Methods First, a series of five Facebook advertising campaigns were run, aimed at “parents” generally (i.e., gender‐neutral). A lack of recruited fathers prompted a second series of six Facebook campaigns aimed solely at fathers. All campaigns targeted employed adult parents of children (≤18 years) in Australia using Facebook's “Adverts Manager.” Results The 11 campaigns recruited a total of 1,468 fathers. The vast majority of these fathers were recruited using the advertisements specifically aimed at fathers (n = 1,441). Gender‐neutral campaigns inviting and selecting “parents” to participate in the study overwhelmingly yielded samples of mothers. Similarly, advertisements inviting both “mums and dads” resulted in very low recruitment of fathers. Conclusions The extremely low numbers of fathers recruited using the gender‐neutral “parent‐focused” campaigns was unexpected. Potential reasons for this include low engagement with gender‐neutral parenting terms, and/or that mothers were disproportionally exposed to the Facebook advertisements. These learnings suggest that father‐focused recruitment is required to target and engage fathers in parenting research and services.

Fathering and masculine norms: Implications for the socialization of children's emotion regulation

“…Changes may include recruiting through word‐of‐mouth from current participants (Stahlschmidt et al, 2013), partnerships with community organizations, on public transportation, or through social service agencies, rather than through doctor's offices or workplaces (Davison et al, 2017). Recruitment may also occur online through social media campaigns specifically targeting fathers (Leach et al, 2019) and crowdsourcing (e.g., Amazon's Mechanical Turk; Parent et al, 2017). Centering low‐income and nonresidential fathers in future research will improve theory, practice, and policy.…”

Parents of young infants report poor mental health and more insensitive parenting during the first Covid-19 lockdown

“…Longitudinal data from our cohort are currently being collected; these data will give us the opportunity to investigate trajectories over time to help unravel potential causal effects. Secondly, more mothers than fathers enrolled in the study, as is common in parenting studies including fathers [ 62 ]. As a result of the discrepancy between the sample sizes of mothers and fathers, our power to find effects for the group of fathers was lower compared to the group of mothers.…”

Effect of time on quality of parent–child communication in pediatric cancer

“…Regardless, limited father participation in pediatric research studies has been a long‐standing challenge 44–46 . Social media advertisements targeting fathers rather than gender‐neutral “parent” strategies have recently been shown to improve recruitment in this population 47 . Additional research on and implementation of paternal recruitment strategies may allow for a more balanced representation of parental perspectives in future studies, and more research is needed to better understand differences in child communication between mothers and fathers.…”