Background Social media tools have provided health researchers with the opportunity to engage with communities and groups in a nonconventional manner to recruit participants for health research. Using social media to advertise research opportunities and recruit participants facilitates accessibility to participants from broad geographical areas and diverse populations. However, little guidance is provided by ethics review boards for researchers to effectively use this recruitment method in their research. Objective This study sought to explore the literature on the use of social media for participant recruitment for research studies and identify the best practices for recruiting participants using this method. Methods An integrative review approach was used to synthesize the literature. A total of 5 health sciences databases, namely, EMBASE (Ovid), MEDLINE (Ovid and EBSCOhost), PsycINFO (Ovid), Scopus (Elsevier), and CINAHL Plus with Full Text (EBSCOhost), were searched using predefined keywords and inclusion and exclusion criteria. The initial search was conducted in October 2020 and was updated in February 2022. Descriptive and content analyses were applied to synthesize the results, and the findings are presented in a narrative and tabular format. Results A total of 96 records were included in this review, 83 (86%) from the initial search and 13 (14%) from the updated search. The publication year ranged between 2011 and 2022, with most publications (63/96, 66%) being from the United States. Regarding recruitment strategy, 45% (43/96) of the studies exclusively used social media, whereas 51% (49/96) used social media in conjunction with other strategies. The remaining 4% (4/96) provided guidelines and recommendations for social media recruitment. Notably, 38% (36/96) of these studies involved hard-to-reach populations. The findings also revealed that the use of social media is a cost-effective and efficient strategy for recruiting research participants. Despite the expanded use across different populations, there is limited participation of older adults in social media recruitment. Conclusions This review provides important insights into the current use of social media for health research participant recruitment. Ethics boards and research support services in academic institutions are encouraged to explicitly provide researchers with guidelines on the use of social media for health research participant recruitment. A preliminary guideline prepared based on the findings of this review is proposed to spark further development in this area.

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Social Media Use for Research Participant Recruitment: Integrative Literature Review

The internet offers exciting opportunities for quick, cost-efficient, and widespread recruitment and data collection without face-to-face contact. Previous research has demonstrated success in reaching population subgroups not typically included in traditional recruitment methods, yet challenges in data quality protection remain paramount. This article describes using Amazon Mechanical Turk, Facebook groups, and email distribution lists to recruit older adults who live alone for a quantitative study using a cross-sectional online survey. Fraudulent survey takers became a major concern in this study, and a protocol was developed to identify and exclude suspicious data. Of 738 recorded participants, 117 responses were retained in the final sample. The majority of sham responses were collected from Facebook with the fewest number of issues identified in responses collected via targeted emailing. Implications for survey design, data analysis, and future research are discussed.

Are Your Participants Real? Dealing with Fraud in Recruiting Older Adults Online

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2022.102521

Remaking academic library services in Zimbabwe in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic

Sustainability entrepreneurs act based on expectations about how products will be received by consumers, in which directions markets and demand will develop, or which business models and innovations will prevail. Through their action-guiding function, expectations play an important role in how sustainability ventures develop in and out of niches. However, little attention has been paid to how new communication media, especially increasingly important social media, affect the way entrepreneurs articulate and change their expectations. This paper addresses this research gap using transformative learning theory to examine the communication of Mexican sustainable fashion entrepreneurs on Instagram. We used snowball sampling to select a representative sample of fashion brands operating in the sustainable fashion niche in Mexico. We used a mixed-methods approach: To analyze entrepreneurs' expectations, their use of social media and other learning outcomes, we employed semi-structured interviews. To track the evolution of entrepreneurs' expectations and their activity on Instagram, we scraped content (posts) from their respective brands' pages. Fashion brands in Mexico with business models based on sustainable fashion are a mixture of market-based and grassroots initiatives. Although sustainability concerns drive the ventures of sustainability entrepreneurs, Instagramhas played a crucial role in the evolution of entrepreneurs' expectations towards innovation with products and business growth. This change in expectations can be understood as a transformative learning process that underscores different phases, action engagement, disorienting dilemmas and discourse. We contribute to opening and exploring the black box regarding the learning processes in the articulation and evolution of expectations. 

Evolution of entrepreneurs’ expectations using Instagram as a business practice: A transformative learning perspective in the case of sustainable fashion entrepreneurs in Mexico

Perspectives and practices regarding colorectal cancer survivorship care: Online survey results from oncology nurses in Thailand.

This article describes the use of Facebook, a website targeting nurses, and snowball sampling for recruitment of registered nurse participants in a qualitative study exploring measurement-driven clinical behavior and metric-driven harm. Previous studies suggest that social media can be a successful and cost-effective sampling strategy, increasing the numbers of participants, their diversity, and their representativeness of the population of interest. This study, however, found traditional snowball sampling to be far more effective than advertisements via Facebook and a professional website. Lessons learned are detailed, including cost and technical issues encountered. Suggestions for nurse researchers considering using Facebook for participant recruitment are described. Methodological research that could enhance the empirical-base supporting effective social media recruitment of research participants is offered for consideration by nurse researchers.

Recruiting Research Participants via Traditional Snowball vs Facebook Advertisements and a Website.

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Recruiting Research Participants via Traditional Snowball vs Facebook Advertisements and a Website.