Social media advertising has become a common tool for participant recruitment, especially when targeting hard-to-reach or underrepresented populations. A common strategy to boost engagement is the use of social group cues – textual or visual references to religion, gender identity, or ethnicity. While these cues can enhance recruitment efficiency, their impact on response data quality remains poorly understood. This study investigates how social group cues affect problematic response behaviour in a Facebook-recruited survey on labour market experiences in Germany. Respondents were recruited via four distinct ad conditions: two referencing Muslim identity, and two with neutral framing. Seven indicators were used …

Migrants are considered a hard-to-reach population – it is hard to recruit them due to lack of accessible sampling frames or recruit in a timely manner if frames are available or self-constructed. Recently, social media advertisement campaigns (ads) have become an increasingly popular method of recruiting hard-to-reach populations, including migrants, due to lower costs and time efficiency. In this paper we concentrate on the time element of some online survey fieldwork where recruitment was facilitated with targeted Facebook ads. The paper uses data from a survey conducted for a project on the impacts of Covid-19 on Polish migrant essential workers …

In many countries and contexts, survey researchers are facing decreasing response rates and increasing survey costs. Data collection is even more complex and expensive when rare or hard-to-reach populations are to be sampled and surveyed. In such cases alternative sampling and recruiting approaches are usually needed, including non-probability and online convenience sampling. A rather novel approach to recruiting rare populations for online and mobile-device surveys uses advertisements on social media networks. This paper provides a step-by-step guide on how to recruit web-survey participants via ads on Facebook and Instagram – two of the largest social networks worldwide. Researchers may use …

Introduction: Hard-to-reach and minority groups are often at higher risk for adverse sexual health outcomes. While such groups are therefore of interest to sexual health researchers, it can be difficult to locate and recruit sufficient sample sizes using probability sampling methods. This study aims to establish whether web-panel surveys can provide a viable less resource intensive means of boosting sample sizes of two hard-to-reach groups (people of Black African ethnicity, and gay men) for a sexual health survey, and the extent of any bias. Methods: Results from a national probability sample survey (Natsal-3, administered using a computer-assisted personal interview (CAPI) …