scholarly journals The Utility of Social Media Recruitment to Achieve a More Diverse Participant Sample

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 875-875
Author(s):  
Faith-Christina Washington ◽  
Tai-Te Su ◽  
Aileen Griffin ◽  
Jacob Sosnoff ◽  
Shannon Meija
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Educational Attainment ◽  
Fall Risk ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Wireless Internet ◽  
Recruitment Methods ◽  
Balance Confidence ◽  
Adult Participants ◽  
Three Samples ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic created an immediate, lasting impact on recruitment methods in academic research, most notably in the field of gerontology. To protect older adult participants’ health during the COVID-19 crisis, the Daily Balance Project, a 30-day micro-longitudinal study of older adults' awareness of balance in daily life, shifted to complete remote administration. Our new remote protocol included developing new methodologies to recruit participants with varying degrees of fall risk and educational attainment. In this study, we present our approach to remote online recruitment and compare educational attainment, objective and subjective fall risk, and alignment of objective/subjective fall risk across three samples recruited via a) Fall Clinic registry (16 participants); b) University e-newsletter to faculty and staff (5 participants); c) social media recruitment (7 participants). Eligibility included being 65+ and wireless internet at home. For samples a and b, screening assessments were conducted via phone while baseline assessments were conducted in-person. For sample c, screener and baseline assessment were virtual. Analysis of recruitment methods aims to determine whether recruitment via social media platforms may provide a sample of participants with more variation in fall risk or alignment of subjective versus objective balance. Results demonstrate no significant differences in educational attainment (p=0.7949) or balance confidence (p=0.213), despite significant differences in the alignment of objective and subjective fall risk (p=0.031). Participants from samples a and b proved more able to accurately assess fall risk, while sample c had the most misalignment between subjective and objective fall risk assessments.

scholarly journals Rapid deployment of a community engagement study and educational trial via social media: implementation of the UC-COVID study

Trials ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren E. Wisk ◽  
Russell G. Buhr
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Search Activity ◽  
Community Partners ◽  
Community Values ◽  
Sample Representativeness ◽  
Adult Participants ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Rapid Deployment

Abstract Background In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and associated adoption of scarce resource allocation (SRA) policies, we sought to rapidly deploy a novel survey to ascertain community values and preferences for SRA and to test the utility of a brief intervention to improve knowledge of and values alignment with a new SRA policy. Given social distancing and precipitous evolution of the pandemic, Internet-enabled recruitment was deemed the best method to engage a community-based sample. We quantify the efficiency and acceptability of this Internet-based recruitment for engaging a trial cohort and describe the approach used for implementing a health-related trial entirely online using off-the-shelf tools. Methods We recruited 1971 adult participants (≥ 18 years) via engagement with community partners and organizations and outreach through direct and social media messaging. We quantified response rate and participant characteristics of our sample, examine sample representativeness, and evaluate potential non-response bias. Results Recruitment was similarly derived from direct referral from partner organizations and broader social media based outreach, with extremely low study entry from organic (non-invited) search activity. Of social media platforms, Facebook was the highest yield recruitment source. Bot activity was present but minimal and identifiable through meta-data and engagement behavior. Recruited participants differed from broader populations in terms of sex, ethnicity, and education, but had similar prevalence of chronic conditions. Retention was satisfactory, with entrance into the first follow-up survey for 61% of those invited. Conclusions We demonstrate that rapid recruitment into a longitudinal intervention trial via social media is feasible, efficient, and acceptable. Recruitment in conjunction with community partners representing target populations, and with outreach across multiple platforms, is recommended to optimize sample size and diversity. Trial implementation, engagement tracking, and retention are feasible with off-the-shelf tools using preexisting platforms. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04373135. Registered on May 4, 2020

Leveraging Social Media for Human Factors Research in Health Care

2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-85
Author(s):  
Rupa S. Valdez ◽  
Annie T. Chen ◽  
Andrew J. Hampton ◽  
Kapil Chalil Madathil ◽  
Elizabeth Lerner Papautsky ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Human Factors ◽  
Disaster Response ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Study Participants ◽  
Human Factors Research

There has been a significant increase in using social media for academic research and there is an opportunity for human factors professionals to incorporate these platforms into their research. Social media platforms provide a rich space to study extant data on health information communication, behaviors, and impacts and to recruit study participants. In this session, panelists will discuss using social media to study health-related topics including health management, gender-based violence, disaster response, self-harm, patient ergonomics, and secondary impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. They will share how they have collected and analyzed data and recruited study participants from social media platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. They will also speak to the benefits and challenges of as well as ethical implications for using social media for research. There will be space for a moderated discussion to identify ways social media can be leveraged for human factors research in health care.

scholarly journals For lack of a better word: neo-identities in non-cisgender, non-straight communities on Tumblr

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Feraday
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
A Site

Non-cisgender and non-straight identity language has long been a site of contention and evolution. There has been an increase in new non-cisgender, non-straight identity words since the creation of the internet, thanks to social media platforms like Tumblr. Tumblr in particular has been host to many conversations about identity and self-naming, though these conversations have not yet been the subject of much academic research. Through interviews and analysis of Tumblr posts, this thesis examines the emergence of new identity words, or neo-identities, used by non-cisgender and non-straight users of Tumblr. The work presents neo-identities as strategies for resisting and challenging cisheteronormative conceptions of gender and attraction, as well as sources of comfort and relief for non-cisgender/non-straight people who feel ‘broken’ and excluded from mainstream identity categories. This thesis also posits that Tumblr is uniquely suited for conversations about identity because of its potential for self-expression, community, and anonymity.

From Street Corners to Social Media: The Changing Location of Youth Citizenship in Guinea

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clovis Bergère
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Youth Politics ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
History Of ◽  
Youth Citizenship ◽  
Media Practices

Abstract:This study explores social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter in particular, as emergent sites of youth citizenship in Guinea. These need to be understood within a longer history of youth citizenship, one that includes street corners and other informal mediations of youth politics. This counters dominant discourses both within the Guinean public sphere and in academic research that decry Guinean social media practices as lacking, or Guinean youth as frivolous or inconsequential in their online political engagements. Instead, young Guineans’ emergent digital practices need to be approached as productive political engagements. This contributes to debates about African youths by examining the role of digital technologies in shaping young Africans’ political horizons.

scholarly journals New Wave of Businesses: Brick to Click Approach in Malaysia

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4.35) ◽  
pp. 777
Author(s):  
Nur Afiqah Mohammad Ishak ◽  
Nurazariah Binti Abidin ◽  
Jegatheesan Rajadurai
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Millennial Generation ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Marketing Strategies ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Wireless Internet ◽  
Analytical Skills ◽  
Key Aspects ◽  
Start Ups

Having been born into a technologically advanced, wireless internet society, today's younger generation or the Millennial, is in a better position to be nurtured as the new age online businesses. They are well educated, self absorbed, have a strong sense of independence and highly motivated toward their perception of success. As such, the Millennial generation rushes forward with their marketing strategies to start businesses using social media to reach out their existing and potential consumers. While there have been numerous studies about traditional businesses, there has been little academic research focused on Millennial and which skills needed to become online businesses This paper proposed to measure the association between social media analytical skills and online businesses competencies within the Millennial generation. A questionnaire was used whose respondents were 100 online businesses among Millennial. It is hoped that this study will significantly contribute to a higher success rate in new start ups of online businesses for the Millennial generation. This study will not only enable for further advance the knowledge of Millennial but also to identify key aspects of online businesses competency in digital technologies.

Paywalls and Payment Systems

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Merja Myllylahti
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Payment Systems ◽  
Media Companies ◽  
Journalism Studies ◽  
Income Sources ◽  
Digital News ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Funding of journalism has become a critical part of journalism and digital journalism studies because no single business model has emerged to solve revenue problems for print and digital news outlets. Despite newspapers’ efforts to expand their income sources, they have remained print reliant in terms of revenue. In 2017, approximately 80% of global news publishers’ revenue still came from print products. While some large news corporations such as The New York Times Co. and News Corp have reported substantial increases in their digital subscription numbers, revenue from subscriptions and digital advertising has not been substantial enough to fund their newsroom structures and journalism. In this context, academia has started to produce more research on news payment systems. Recent studies of payment systems have largely concentrated on people’s willingness to pay for news. Academic researchers have also studied paywall models, content, and revenue. Additionally, crowdfunding as a source of revenue for news has been investigated, and the research on membership models is expanding. Most of the studies about news payment systems have concluded that none of the news payment systems—including paywalls, micropayments, donations, and memberships—is (on its own) sustainable for funding future journalism. Paywall can be understood as a subscription model that limits the public’s access to all or to some digital news content without a payment. Micropayments allow readers to pay per article or per view. Memberships allow the public to access certain content (premium content) or extra services such as events for a fee. Donations refer to the public’s voluntary monetary contributions to produce news articles or projects to the news sites. News publishers have become increasingly dependent on social media platforms such as Facebook for their content distribution. However, there is still very little academic research about news payment systems related to Facebook or other social media companies. This may well be because there is no transparent information about this kind of revenue as the news industry itself is not reporting on it.

scholarly journals At close quarters: Combatting Facebook design, features and temporalities in social research

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205395171880231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Gangneux ◽  
Stevie Docherty
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Empirical Data ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Other ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Research ◽  
Social Media Research

As researchers we often find ourselves grappling with social media platforms and data ‘at close quarters’. Although social media platforms were created for purposes other than academic research – which are apparent in their architecture and temporalities – they offer opportunities for researchers to repurpose them for the collection, generation and analysis of rich datasets. At the same time, this repurposing raises an evolving range of practical and methodological challenges at the small and large scale. We draw on our experiences and empirical data from two research projects, one using Facebook Community Pages and the other repurposing Facebook Activity Logs. This article reflects critically on the specific challenges we faced using these platform features, on their common roots, and the tactics we adopted in response. De Certeau’s distinction between strategy and tactics provides a useful framework for exploring these struggles as located in the practice of doing social research – which often ends up being tactical. This article argues that we have to collectively discuss, demystify and devise tactics to mitigate the strategies and temporalities deeply embedded in platforms, corresponding as far as possible to the temporalities and the aims of our research. Although combat at close quarters is inevitable in social media research, dialogue between researchers is more than ever needed to tip the scales in our favour.

scholarly journals The Search for Consumers of Web-Based Raw DNA Interpretation Services: Using Social Media to Target Hard-to-Reach Populations

10.2196/12980 ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. e12980
Author(s):  
Tiernan J Cahill ◽  
Blake Wertz ◽  
Qiankun Zhong ◽  
Andrew Parlato ◽  
John Donegan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Social Media Platform ◽  
Recruitment Methods ◽  
Direct To Consumer ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Hard To Reach Populations ◽  
Media Platform

Background In recent years, there has been a proliferation of third-party Web-based services available to consumers to interpret raw DNA from direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies. Little is known about who uses these services and the downstream health implications. Identifying this hard-to-reach population of consumers for research raised questions about the most effective recruitment methods to undertake. Past studies have found that Web-based social media survey distribution can be cost-effective for targeting hard-to-reach populations, yet comparative efficacy information across platforms is limited. Objective The aim of this study was to identify the most effective Web-based strategies to identify and recruit the target population of direct-to-consumer genetic testing users who also made use of third-party interpretation services to analyze their raw genetic data. Web-based survey recruitment methods varying by social media platform and advertising method were compared in terms of cost-effectiveness and demographics of survey respondents. Methods A total of 5 Web-based survey distribution conditions were examined: 4 paid advertising services and 1 unpaid service. For the paid services, a 2x2 quasi-experimental design compared social media platforms (Facebook vs Twitter) and advertising tracking metrics (by click vs by conversion). The fifth unpaid comparison method consisted of study postings on the social media platform, Reddit, without any paid advertising. Links to identical Web-based versions of the study questionnaire were posted for 10 to 14 days for each of the distribution conditions, which allowed tracking the number of respondents that entered and completed the questionnaire by distribution condition. Results In total, 438 individuals were recruited to the study through all conditions. A nearly equivalent number of participants were recruited from paid campaigns on Facebook (n=159) and Twitter (n=167), with a smaller sample recruited on Reddit (n=112). Significantly more participants were recruited through conversion-tracking (n=222) than through click-tracking campaigns (n=104; Z=6.5, P<.001). Response rates were found to be partially driven by organic sharing of recruitment materials among social media users. Conversion tracking was more cost-effective than click tracking across paid social media platforms. Significant differences in terms of gender and age distributions were noted between the platforms and between the tracking metrics. Conclusions Web-based recruitment methods were effective at recruiting participants from a hard-to-reach population in a short time frame. There were significant differences in the effectiveness of various paid advertising techniques. Recruitment through Web-based communities also appeared to perform adequately, yet it may be limited by the number of users accessible in open community groups. Future research should evaluate the impact of organic sharing of recruitment materials because this appeared to play a substantial role in the observed effectiveness of different methods.

scholarly journals An Overview of Social Media Apps and their Potential Role in Geospatial Research

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 526
Author(s):  
Innocensia Owuor ◽  
Hartwig H. Hochmair
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Spatial Data ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Evaluation Criteria ◽  
Application Programming Interface ◽  
Data Access ◽  
Google Scholar ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Word Clouds ◽  
Social Media Platforms

Social media apps provide analysts with a wide range of data to study behavioral aspects of our everyday lives and to answer societal questions. Although social media data analysis is booming, only a handful of prominent social media apps, such as Twitter, Foursquare/Swarm, Facebook, or LinkedIn are typically used for this purpose. However, there is a large selection of less known social media apps that go unnoticed in the scientific community. This paper reviews 110 social media apps and assesses their potential usability in geospatial research through providing metrics on selected characteristics. About half of the apps (57 out of 110) offer an Application Programming Interface (API) for data access, where rate limits, fee models, and type of spatial data available for download vary strongly between the different apps. To determine the current role and relevance of social media platforms that offer an API in academic research, a search for scientific papers on Google Scholar, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library, and the Science Core Collection of the Web of Science (WoS) is conducted. This search revealed that Google Scholar returns the highest number of documents (Mean = 183,512) compared to ACM (Mean = 1895) and WoS (Mean = 1495), and that data and usage patterns from prominent social media apps are more frequently analyzed in research studies than those of less known apps. The WoS citation database was also used to generate lists of themes covered in academic publications that analyze the 57 social media platforms that offer an API. Results show that among these 57 platforms, for 26 apps at least some papers evolve around a geospatial discipline, such as Geography, Remote Sensing, Transportation, or Urban Planning. This analysis, therefore, connects apps with commonly used research themes, and together with tabulated API characteristics can help researchers to identify potentially suitable social media apps for their research. Word clouds generated from titles and abstracts of papers associated with the 57 platforms, grouped into seven thematic categories, show further refinement of topics addressed in the analysis of social media platforms. Considering various evaluation criteria, such as provision of geospatial data or the number (i.e., absence) of currently published research papers in connection with a social media platform, the study concludes that among the numerous social media apps available today, 17 less known apps deserve closer examination since they might be used to investigate previously underexplored research topics. It is hoped that this study can serve as a reference for the analysis of the social media landscape in the future.

scholarly journals For lack of a better word: neo-identities in non-cisgender, non-straight communities on Tumblr

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Feraday
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Creation ◽  
A Site

Non-cisgender and non-straight identity language has long been a site of contention and evolution. There has been an increase in new non-cisgender, non-straight identity words since the creation of the internet, thanks to social media platforms like Tumblr. Tumblr in particular has been host to many conversations about identity and self-naming, though these conversations have not yet been the subject of much academic research. Through interviews and analysis of Tumblr posts, this thesis examines the emergence of new identity words, or neo-identities, used by non-cisgender and non-straight users of Tumblr. The work presents neo-identities as strategies for resisting and challenging cisheteronormative conceptions of gender and attraction, as well as sources of comfort and relief for non-cisgender/non-straight people who feel ‘broken’ and excluded from mainstream identity categories. This thesis also posits that Tumblr is uniquely suited for conversations about identity because of its potential for self-expression, community, and anonymity.

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