Using Facebook to Recruit Parents to a Parenting Program to Prevent Teen Drug Use

Introduction: There is strong evidence that parenting programs are effective in preventing teen substance use. However, it is difficult to recruit parents to family programs. Social media may be a promising parent recruitment tool but have not yet been studied in this context. Finding effective recruitment strategies is important because parenting programs hold great promise for the prevention of substance use and addiction community-wide. This pilot project studied the feasibility of using the social networking site Facebook to recruit parents to complete a self-directed parenting program to prevent teen substance use.

Methods: Paid Facebook ads and subsequent referrals from ad-recruited parents were used to recruit parents of middle school-aged children in Washington and Colorado to participate in the self-directed parenting program “Parenting in the Middle School Years.” This program is an updated version of the “Moving to Middle School” component of the evidence-based Raising Healthy Children intervention. Success and cost of recruitment methods were assessed using data provided by Facebook. Data about the composition of the recruited sample came from a web survey of recruited parents.

Results: We succeeded in recruiting 103 parents of middle school children (44% of eligible parents) in 13 weeks: 54% were recruited via Facebook ads, 36% through participant referrals, and 10% through project staff referrals and post on a blog for parents of teens. According to Facebook data, the ads were shown to 234,256 people, resulting in 2,866 clicks on the ads that brought parents to the external study website with a link to the eligibility survey. The resulting click-through rate (1.22%) was higher than typically reported in other studies. However, only 362 parents took the eligibility survey, 65% of which were eligible for participation in the study. In total, we spent $2358 for the ad campaign ($0.82 per ad click). The cost per recruited participant was about $32 (counting advertising costs and $15 incentive payments for each successful referral). The presentation will also include comparisons between recruitment via Facebook and referrals and report on the relative success of different ads, comparing general parenting- vs. marijuana-focused ads and a fear- vs. want-based framework (text and images).

Although social media have the potential to have broad reach across gender, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic groups, the sample of parents recruited in this study was fairly homogeneous, comprised of highly educated mothers (only 1 father) living in Washington and living in better economic situations than the average state resident. The racial/ethnic background of the sample was, however, comparable to the state. Additional data from the web survey will be presented to describe the sample, including parenting practices and parent and teen substance use.

Conclusions: This study showed that using Facebook ads to recruit parents to a research study is feasible and cost-effective and may have worked better than snowball sampling. However, the research context may also have resulted in a selective sample. Further work is need to understand how Facebook ads might be used for community-based recruitment.