Recruiting Online: Lessons From a Longitudinal Survey of Contraception and Pregnancy Intentions of Young Australian Women

Abstract

Recruitment of young people for epidemiologic research remains challenging, with marked decreases in the effectiveness of face-to-face, mail, and telephone recruitment methods. We report on the implementation and feasibility of an innovative and flexible approach used to recruit participants for a longitudinal cohort study about contraceptive use and pregnancy (the Contraceptive Use, Pregnancy Intention, and Decisions (CUPID) Study). Australian women aged 18-23 years were recruited using a range of online, networking, and offline methods, including social media (primarily Facebook (Facebook Inc., Menlo Park, California; http://www.facebook.com)), face-to-face events, distribution of promotional material, and media releases. Over the course of the 1-year recruitment period (beginning in September 2012), a total of 3,795 eligible women were recruited to complete the online survey, at a cost of approximately A$11 per participant. This sample was found to be broadly representative of the Australian population of women aged 18-23 years in terms of demographic characteristics, with the exception of an overrepresentation of tertiary-educated women (88.7% compared with 72.6%). This study demonstrated that although current recruitment strategies are required to be innovative and flexible in order to engage young people in epidemiologic research, representative samples can be achieved online at reasonable cost.

Evaluating different recruitment methods in a longitudinal survey: Findings from the pan-European PASTA project (Preprint)

“…One explanation may lie in the different approach from Oerebro, who also recruited participants through random sampling. The findings suggest that people that are more interested in the topic (in this case in active mobility research) are more willing to participate in a survey and are more likely to stay in the study than those who are selected randomly and may not have a strong connection to the research topic [4][5][6][7]. Therefore a (costly) random selection may eventually still lead to a biased sample that it was supposed to avoid.…”

“…Meeting these requirements is especially challenging for surveys with high response burdens such as longitudinal studies [3]. Traditional recruitment methods such as mailed invitations based on samples drawn from population registries are costly and increasingly yield sample biases due to declining response rates and selectivity effects [4][5][6][7], e.g. due to an increase in exclusive use of mobile phones or email rather than traditional mail or landline phone.…”

“…due to an increase in exclusive use of mobile phones or email rather than traditional mail or landline phone. Opportunistic approaches such as recruitment via social media promise cost savings [4,[7][8][9][10][11][12] and a better coverage of person groups that are hard to reach with the traditional recruitment methods, like parents of adolescents [8], adolescents themselves [10], people with special conditions [13,14], smokers [15] or low-income people [16]. Social media, like Facebook and Twitter, can potentially have a strong snowballing effect [17] given their intensive use and continuing growth (around 1.94 billion monthly active Facebook users worldwide [26]), their feature that information can be shared very easily among networks [17], and are therefore able to reach a large number of people in a very short time.…”

“…One major drawback of the opportunistic recruitment methods is the concern of sample bias as the population reached thereby does not necessarily represent each group of the total population equally well [10]. Specific types of social media might, for example, be preferably used by younger people [3,7,11] and not by elderly. In this case, elderly have little chance to be sampled at all.…”

A qualitative analysis of women's explanations for changing contraception: the importance of non-contraceptive effects

“…Women were recruited through face-to-face events, social media, family planning clinics, media coverage, and word of mouth. This cohort was found to be largely representative of young Australian women in terms of demographic profile, with the exception of an over-representation of high school completers 10. The study received ethics approval from three university ethics boards and a local family planning clinic.…”