Family caregiver recruitment via social media: challenges, opportunities and lessons

Illness blogs are a way seriously ill people communicate publicly about their illness journey. As communication about serious illness increases on social media, it is important to evaluate how this affects the family caregiver. However, identifying and accessing family caregivers remains challenging, especially via social media.

The aim of this article is to report the opportunities, challenges and lessons learned from using social media to recruit family caregivers.

Recruitment methods included posting study invitations on illness blogs, advertising through Facebook and placing study fliers in the community.

Using social media to recruit was inexpensive and provided a wide geographical reach. One important finding was discovering the importance of using language in the recruitment materials that family caregivers could identify with to help deem themselves as eligible to participate in the study.