Using Facebook Ads as a Recruitment Strategy for Web Surveys on Drugs: Experience from the European Web Survey on Drugs

Abstract

BACKGROUND: General population surveys present a useful tool for getting information on drug use prevalence, but they often fail to reach a sufficient number of users, which is required to get detailed information on use patterns or other characteristics. Web surveys, especially when they use social networking sites, might present a complementary mechanism for getting a better picture of drug use by reaching hard-to-reach populations. AIM: The main objective of this study was to examine Facebook advertisements as a recruitment strategy in the “European Web Survey on Drugs: patterns of use”, a project organized by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction. METHODS: Recruitment campaigns invited adults aged 18+ years who had consumed at least one drug (cannabis, MDMA/ ecstasy, amphetamines, or cocaine) in the past 12 months to complete an online survey. The advertisements were created in Facebook’s Advertisement program and were used in Croatia, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. RESULTS: Among the eligible participants recruited via Facebook (N=5256), 68.1% were from Croatia, 24.4% from Switzerland, and 7.5% from the Netherlands. The Croatian and Swiss participants were younger and more likely to be males compared to the Dutch participants. Chi-square tests showed that there were significant differences in the frequency of drug use between the samples from the different countries for almost all drugs. CONCLUSION: The Facebook recruitment strategy was successful in reaching young adults, as well as recreational drug users, although the costs, campaign duration, available budget, and content of the ad images differed among the countries.

Using social media as a recruitment strategy in web surveys

“…This might reflect differences in motivation to participate in online surveys, but also variations in preferences of social networks among different age groups in included countries. More information on characteristics of participants is available in Jerković, Lotar Rihtarić, Van Laar, Horvat, Udrisard, and Matias (2019). Other research also showed that Facebook is especially effective in targeting young people (e.g.…”

“…Furthermore, convenience sampling was open to self-selection bias, and therefore our results cannot be generalizable. In addition, convenience sampling methods that do not set demographic quotas while targeting might result in a substantial number of homogeneous participants, which could have been the case in this survey (Jerković et al, 2019). This is because Facebook's marketing algorithms maximizes clicks on the advertisement by sending it to the users that the algorithm recognizes as those who will click on an advertisement with high probability.…”