Are Your Participants Real? Dealing with Fraud in Recruiting Older Adults Online

The internet offers exciting opportunities for quick, cost-efficient, and widespread recruitment and data collection without face-to-face contact. Previous research has demonstrated success in reaching population subgroups not typically included in traditional recruitment methods, yet challenges in data quality protection remain paramount. This article describes using Amazon Mechanical Turk, Facebook groups, and email distribution lists to recruit older adults who live alone for a quantitative study using a cross-sectional online survey. Fraudulent survey takers became a major concern in this study, and a protocol was developed to identify and exclude suspicious data. Of 738 recorded participants, 117 responses were retained in the final sample. The majority of sham responses were collected from Facebook with the fewest number of issues identified in responses collected via targeted emailing. Implications for survey design, data analysis, and future research are discussed.