Social media as a recruitment platform for a nationwide online survey of COVID-19 knowledge, beliefs, and practices in the United States: Methodology and feasibility analysis (Preprint)

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has evolved into one of the most impactful health crises in modern history. The rapid onset and evolution of the pandemic has compelled researchers to explore innovative ways to efficiently collect public health data in a timely manner. Social media platforms, such as Facebook, have been explored as a recruitment tool for research in other settings; however, their feasibility for collecting data on population beliefs and practices during infectious disease epidemics, such as COVID-19, and their capacity to yield nationally representative samples in these contexts remain unexplored.

This study has two aims 1) describe the methodology used to recruit a nationwide sample of adults residing in the United States to participate in a survey on COVID-19 knowledge, beliefs, and practices, and 2) outline the preliminary findings related to recruitment, challenges using social media as a recruitment platform, and strategies used to address these challenges.

A Facebook advertisement campaign was used to disseminate the link to an online Qualtrics survey between March 20-30, 2020. Two supplementary male-only and racial minority- targeted advertisements with otherwise identical characteristics to the original advertisement were created on the sixth and tenth day of recruitment, respectively, to address issues of disproportionate female- and White-oriented gender- and ethnic-skewing observed in the advertisement’s reach and response trends.

The advertisements cumulatively reached 236,017 individuals and resulted in 9,609 clicks (4.07% reach). In total, 6,602 participant responses were recorded (68.7% of those who clicked on the advertisement). Total cost of the advertisement was $906, resulting in costs of $0.09 per click, $0.14 per response (all surveys), and $0.18 per full response (completed surveys). Implementation of the supplementary male-only advertisement successfully improved the cumulative percentage of male respondents from approximately 20% to 40%.

The social media advertisement campaign was an effective and efficient strategy to collect large scale, nationwide data on COVID-19 within a short time period. However, significant limitations included gender and racial skewing, which may have resulted from Facebook’s cost optimization algorithms, and advertisement review challenges. Future research should attempt to address such challenges. These findings can inform future research on the use of social media recruitment for the rapid collection of survey data on knowledge, beliefs and practices related to significant public health problems, including rapidly evolving pandemics such as COVID-19.