A Comparison of Three Online Recruitment Strategies for Engaging Parents

• Author: Heather Hessel,Kate Gliske,Jessie H. Rudi,Jodi Dworkin
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12206
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016

J D, H H, K G,  J H. R University of Minnesota

A Comparison of Three Online Recruitment

Strategies for Engaging Parents

Family scientists can face the challenge of

effectively and efciently recruiting norma-

tive samples of parents and families. Utilizing

the Internet to recruit parents is a strategic

way to nd participants where they already

are, enabling researchers to overcome many

of the barriers to in-person recruitment. The

present study was designed to compare three

online recruitment strategies for recruiting par-

ents: e-mail Listservs, Facebook, and Amazon

Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Analyses revealed

differences in the effectiveness and efciency of

data collection. In particular, MTurk resulted in

the most demographically diverse sample, in a

short period of time, with little cost. Listservs

reached a large number of participants and

resulted in a comparatively homogeneous sam-

ple. Facebook was not successful in recruiting

a general sample of parents. Findings provide

information that can help family researchersand

practitioners be intentional about recruitment

strategies and study design.

The task of effectively and efciently recruiting

parents to participate in research can be chal-

lenging; researchers are left to gure out where

to nd and how to recruit parents who are not

experiencing a particular challenge or crisis. For

instance, newspaper advertisements used to be

Department of Family Social Science, University of Min-

nesota, 1985 Buford Avenue, 290 McNeal Hall, Saint Paul,

MN 55108 (jdworkin@umn.edu).

Key Words: Data collection, Facebook, MTurk, online

recruitment, parenting.

a common method for recruiting research sam-

ples (Karney & Bradbury, 1995), but only 20%

of adults in the United States now report get-

ting their news via print papers (Mitchell, Got-

tfried, Barthel, & Shearer, 2016). Similarly, the

use of phone books and random-digit dialing

of households has become an unviable sample

recruitment strategy, given that only 39.1% of

households with children had a landline tele-

phone in 2015 (and that number is dropping pre-

cipitously, down from 53% in 2012; Blumburg

& Luke, 2016). However, online data collection

is in many ways the modern-day equivalent of

random-digit dialing (Chang & Krosnick, 2009).

A broad range of potential participants can

be reached via the Internet. For example, 87%

of adults in the United States are online regu-

larly (Pew Research Center, 2014), and 76% of

them use social networking sites (Pew Research

Center, 2015). Thus, utilizing the Internet to

recruit families is a potentially cost-effective

and time-efcient way to nd participants where

they already are, enabling researchers to over-

come many of the barriers to in-person recruit-

ment (Beneld & Szlemko, 2006).

Most previous research has compared online

recruitment methods to ofine recruitment meth-

ods (e.g., Riva, Teruzzi, & Anolli, 2003; Vial,

Starks, & Parsons, 2015; Ward,Clark, Zabriskie,

& Morris, 2014), with limited methodologi-

cal discussion around online research methods

(Fielding, Lee, & Blank, 2008). The technology

tools available to accomplish recruitment goals

include basic resources such as e-mail List-

servs, social networking sites, and more sophis-

ticated strategies such as online labor markets.

550 Family Relations 65 (October 2016): 550–561

DOI:10.1111/fare.12206