Obtaining contextually relevant geographic data using Facebook recruitment in public health studies

Introduction: Online participant recruitment for public health research studies has increased dramatically in recent years, particularly as traditional recruitment strategies have waned in efficiency. The emergence of e-epidemiology offers possibilities for reaching understudied populations as well as conducting large-scale studies.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional survey focused on self-reported neighborhood characteristics, perceived stress, and feasibility of obtaining work/residential addresses via online recruitment in St. Louis, Missouri, USA from February 2017 to December 2017. We report the process of using Facebook recruitment and demonstrate how this strategy can enhance collection of geospatial data to better understand context and spatial patterns of disease.

Results: A total of 425 participants were recruited via Facebook advertisements. All participants reported their residential and work ZIP codes, though only 64.7% and 45.6% provided their complete residential and work street addresses, respectively. Those who reported their complete residential street addresses were more likely to be female (69.8% vs. 56.1% of males, χ² = 7.89, 1 df, p = 0.005), though no differences were observed by race, age, or employment status.

Discussion: These findings indicate that valuable location data can be successfully collected via Facebook recruitment - data that could potentially include residential history or prospective follow-up time or be combined with other emerging technologies for geographic data in order to better understand the context and the effects of place on health outcomes.

Conclusions: Facebook recruitment may be an underutilized resource for obtaining accurate geospatial and contextually relevant health data and should be considered as a means for finding participants due to the cost-effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility of this recruitment approach.