Four Innovative Methods to Recruit Community Samples of Young Adults

By Emily Waterman, MS | July 7, 2016
PhD Candidate at Pennsylvania State University & ETR Kirby Summer Intern

Young adulthood, the time of life around ages 18-28, is an exciting period for development. Young adults often establish lifelong health habits, solidify world views, and make important decisions about work and family life. They also tend to engage in more risk behavior than people of other ages do.

Because of the importance of young adulthood, researchers and preventionists often wish to target young adults for studies and program evaluations. Researchers tend to turn to college student samples, because they are more easily recruited and followed for longitudinal studies than community samples. However, college students are not representative of the entire young adult population, which is older, less educated, and more diverse in terms of race and ethnicity.

Many experts have called for more research using community samples of young adults, as opposed to college samples. But how can a researcher recruit community samples of young adults? Here are four innovative recruiting methods to get you started.

Inbound Calling

Telephone surveys via random digit dialing are popular for political surveys and can also be used for research. Such calls can be annoying to potential participants, and many people screen their calls to avoid marketers or researchers. In addition, there are federal restrictions on this type of calling, especially on cell phone calling. However, there is another way to reach potential participants on the phone—have them call you.

The company Reconnect Research connects researchers to people already on the phone. When a caller misdials a number or calls a number that is no longer in service, this company redirects the call to a survey. The company argues that misdials are essentially random, and that since people already planned to be on the phone, they are more likely to participate in a survey.

“Inbound” call surveys tend to yield younger samples than “outbound” call surveys, but a researcher would still have to screen callers to make sure they were part of the target age group. Additionally, researchers can ask callers if they want to be part of future research, so it might be possible to follow-up with participants longitudinally. 

Music Festivals

Some past research has recruited young adult samples at music festivals. You can find examples of studies that used festival recruitment here and here. Recruiting at music festivals has the advantage of diversity—attendees at festivals include both college students and nonstudents. In addition, older young adults (ages 22 to 28), another understudied population, also attend festivals.

Festival recruiting has the disadvantage of being nonrandom.However, it has the advantage of being, well, fun. Last year at the Society for the Study of Emerging Adulthood Pre-conference on Sex and Romance, Dr. Daphne Van de Bongardt gave a presentation on festival recruitment. In her research, the study itself actually took place at the festival—a study of speed dating. Because the project fit into the fun environment of the festival, they were able to easily recruit participants. One could imagine that concerts, fairs and sporting events might also be places to recruit young adults.

MTurk

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, or MTurk, enables researchers to obtain survey participants quickly and at low cost. The MTurk service connects businesses and researchers with a diverse workforce. As an MTurk worker, individuals choose tasks based on their qualifications and interest. Available tasks include surveys.

It is possible both to screen participants for age and follow participants longitudinally on MTurk. MTurk is quick, easy and relatively inexpensive. Also, MTurk samples are more diverse than other samples.

However, some researchers have concerns about ethics and data quality from MTurk. MTurk doesn’t pay a lot, often just a few dollars an hour. To compensate, researchers can opt to pay more than the default rate. In regards to data quality, some researchers argue that MTurk produces high-quality data, while other researchers are less sure. So, while it may not be rigorous to base an entire body of research on MTurk samples, MTurk can be used ethically in conjunction with other methodologies.

Facebook

Facebook has over one billion users, and, not surprisingly, Facebook users tend to be younger than the general population. Thus, Facebook is a good way to find young adults of all kinds. There are a few different ways to recruit participants on Facebook and other social media.

First, researchers can simply post an online survey and ask their Facebook friends to take the survey and share it on their own pages, similar to traditional snowball sampling. This method can be essentially free; however, it may produce biased results, as people tend to share the survey with others like themselves.

Another way to recruit on Facebook is to buy advertising. Facebook advertising can target particular users, including young adults, and be focused to connect with unique or hard-to-reach participants. Facebook may also be a way to stay in contact with participants. However, given the amount of personal information available on social media, and the blurred lines between public and private information, researchers have to be prudent about ethical standards for Facebook research. Hint: similar techniques can be used on other social media sites such as Google and Twitter.

 

Emily Waterman is a PhD candidate at The Pennsylvania State University in the Human Development and Family Studies Department. She is also a 2016 Kirby Summer Intern. Emily's research spans two broad areas: (1) development in young adulthood with a focus on sexuality and college health, and (2) the use of the design thinking framework to develop innovative prevention programs. She can be reached at ewaterman1123@gmail.com.