Contemporary Views of Research Participant Willingness to Participate and Share Digital Data in Biomedical Research

Using social media to recruit participants is a common and cost-effective practice. Willingness to participate (WTP) in biomedical research is a function of trust in the scientific team, which is closely tied to the source of funding and institutional connections.

To determine whether WTP and willingness to share social media data are associated with the type of research team and online recruitment platform.

This mixed-methods longitudinal survey and qualitative study was conducted over 2 points (T1 and T2) using Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform. Participants were US adults aged 18 years or older who use at least 1 social media platform. Recruitment was stratified to match race/ethnicity proportions of the 2010 US Census. The volunteer sample consisted of 914 participants at T1, and 655 participants completed the follow-up survey 5 months later (T2).

Outcomes were (1) past experience with online research and sharing social media data for research; (2) WTP in research advertised online; (3) WTP in a study sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, a university, or a federal agency; and (4) willingness to share social media data. Opinions were solicited regarding the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation statute, which came into effect between T1 and T2.

Of 914 participants completing the first survey (T1), 604 (66.1%) were aged 18 to 39 years and 494 (54.0%) were female. Of these, 655 participants (71.7%) responded at T2. While 680 participants (74.4%) indicated WTP in biomedical research, only 454 (49.3%) were willing to share their social media data. Participants were significantly less likely to participate in federally sponsored (odds ratio [OR], 0.58; 95% CI, 0.51-0.64; P < .001) or pharmaceutical company (OR, 0.59; 95% CI, 0.53-0.66; P < .001) research than university-led studies. They were also less likely to share their social medial data for federal (OR, 0.65; 95% CI, 0.58-0.72; P < .001) or pharmaceutical company (OR, 0.50; 95% CI, 0.44-0.56; P < .001) research compared with academic studies. Willingness to participate in pharmaceutical company-led research decreased 11.89% from T1 to T2 (OR for T2, 0.62; 95% CI, 0.54-0.77; P < .001). Reasons for WTP were interest in furthering science, financial incentives, trust in the organization, and data security. While 63.0% of respondents reported seeing new privacy policy emails related to the General Data Protection Regulation law, only 27.1% indicated this positively influenced their WTP. Thematic analysis of responses indicated that WTP may improve with stronger data security measures.

This study suggests that researchers may see reduced online research participation and data sharing, particularly for research conducted outside academia.