Recruitment and retention of youth for research using social media: Experiences from the Just/Us study

Youth, particularly youth of color, continue to face disparities with regard to sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV. Yet, comprehensive education about sex and sexual risk for STIs is not universal for youth in the United States. While Internet research on HIV prevention has demonstrated that the medium can be as effective as face-to-face education and prevention approaches, Internet-based research has faced challenges in recruitment of diverse samples, has not consistently been able to retain adequate samples, and do so for long-term follow-up. Additionally, we have few examples of research on social networking sites, which are particularly popular with youth and represent locations where they spend the majority of their time online. In this work, we describe efforts to recruit and retain youth on My Space and Facebook for a randomized controlled trial testing the efficacy of using social media for HIV prevention. Findings demonstrate no success in using My Space to recruit for our STI prevention intervention, but success in recruitment of a diverse sample and short-term retention of this sample using Facebook. We recruited 1578 diverse youth aged 16-24 years for the study and retained 69% of them for a two-month follow-up; follow-up dropped to 50% at six months, demonstrating challenges with longer-term retention. This work represents innovation in recruitment and retention of individuals and networks using social media.