Fazzino Tera L, Rose Gail L, Pollack Scott M, Helzer John E
Department of Preventive Medicine & Public Health, University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, Kansas.
Department of Psychiatry, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont.
J Stud Alcohol Drugs. 2015 Jan;76(1):127-32.
Recruiting young adults for health research is challenging. Social media provides wide access to potential research participants. We evaluated the feasibility of recruiting students via free message postings on Facebook and Twitter to participate in a web-based brief intervention study. The sample comprised students attending U.S. and Canadian universities.
During three semesters, institutional review board-approved recruitment messages were posted in 281 Facebook groups, 7 Facebook pages, and 27 message "tweets" on Twitter.
A total of 708 eligible participants were recruited from Facebook. The mean enrollment rate per Facebook group was 0.21%; the rate was higher for host university groups (1.56%) compared with groups at other universities (0.10%). We recruited seven participants from Twitter. The sample was predominantly female (70%) with a mean age of 20.0 years. There were no significant differences between host university participants recruited through social media and traditional methods. The web-based intervention completion rate was 65%, and participants from the host university were more likely to complete the intervention than were groups at other universities (p = .01).
Social media provides access to a large number of potential participants, and social media recruitment may be useful to researchers who can harness this broad reach. Facebook recruitment was feasible and free and resulted in a large number of enrolled participants. Social media recruitment for researchers at their own universities may be particularly fruitful. Despite wide access to students with Twitter, recruitment was slow. Social media recruitment allowed us to extend web-based intervention access to students in the United States and Canada.
招募年轻人参与健康研究具有挑战性。社交媒体为接触潜在研究参与者提供了广泛途径。我们评估了通过在脸书和推特上免费发布信息招募学生参与一项基于网络的简短干预研究的可行性。样本包括就读于美国和加拿大大学的学生。
在三个学期期间，经机构审查委员会批准的招募信息发布在281个脸书群组、7个脸书页面以及推特上的27条“推文”中。
从脸书共招募到708名符合条件的参与者。每个脸书群组的平均招募率为0.21%；与其他大学的群组（0.10%）相比，主办大学群组的招募率更高（1.56%）。我们从推特招募到7名参与者。样本以女性为主（70%），平均年龄为20.0岁。通过社交媒体招募的主办大学参与者与通过传统方法招募的参与者之间没有显著差异。基于网络的干预完成率为65%，主办大学的参与者比其他大学的群组更有可能完成干预（p = 0.01）。
社交媒体为接触大量潜在参与者提供了途径，社交媒体招募对能够利用其广泛影响力的研究人员可能有用。脸书招募可行且免费，招募到了大量参与者。在自己大学进行社交媒体招募对研究人员可能特别有成效。尽管通过推特能广泛接触到学生，但招募进展缓慢。社交媒体招募使我们能够将基于网络的干预推广到美国和加拿大的学生。
