%A Jonathan Raviotta
%T College Participant Recruitment Through Facebook Ads: Is Anybody Listening?
%X To combat cervical cancer, the United States public health policy has advocated Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination for all adolescent females. This female-only HPV vaccination campaign has failed to reach sufficiently protective uptake levels. New research describing strong associations between HPV and cancers afflicting both sexes, revised cost-effectiveness models, and the FDA licensure of a vaccine for men, has led to the inclusion of males into the U.S. HPV vaccination campaign. Including men in the ongoing campaign has raised new research questions and logistical challenges. Among those, is the challenge of how to effectively recruit men into HPV vaccine trials. Communication about HPV infection has been strongly linked with female cancers and suffers from sexual stigmatization. This study compared conventional recruitment of 18-25 year old men into a clinical HPV vaccination trial with recruitment through Facebook Ads?. Facebook Ads? produced 20% of the study sample. Of the 44 men who first heard about the study through social sites, only 13 of these men also heard about the study through a conventional recruitment strategy, suggesting that conventional recruitment methods can be supplemented by social media recruitment. A larger than expected proportion of Facebook recruits were homosexual or bisexual (p=.02) and were also more active in social media (p=.02) than expected. The findings of this investigation suggest that Facebook and other social platforms could be a useful public health communication and recruitment tool for interventions or studies targeting 18-25 year old men, especially those who are homosexual or bisexual.
%D 2012
%K Facebook
participant recruitment
college men
18-25 year old men
HPV
%I University of Pittsburgh
%L pittir12201