Facebook recruitment: understanding research relations Prior to data collection

This article considers the multiple relations that emerge from and between Facebook commenters, as well as between commenters, researchers, and the research project during recruitment. To do so, we draw on our experiences of recruiting individuals who have concerns about or are opposed to a range of recent social and legal changes in 'post-equality' contexts. Understanding research as co-created rather than 'collecting data from' participants, we consider the researcher, commenters, and Facebook technologies as active agents, and ask how the emergent relationalities between these agents shapes the social media recruitment process. We develop thinking regarding these relationalities through an in-depth exploration of our processes that reveal key methodological considerations relevant to social media recruitment in the social sciences. As the process of recruitment is mutually constructed online through multiple relationalities across researcher/project and commenter, as well as between commenters themselves, we conclude that there is a need for dynamic, iterative, and reflexive responses and engagements rather than pre-defined frameworks.