- Title
- It's not raining men: a mixed-methods study investigating methods of improving male recruitment to health behaviour research
- Creator
- Ryan, Jillian; Lopian, Luke; Le, Brian; Edney, Sarah; Van Kessel, Gisela; Plotnikoff, Ronald; Vandelanotte, Corneel; Olds, Tim; Maher, Carol
- Relation
- NHMRC.1080186 http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/1080186
- Relation
- BMC Public Health Vol. 19, Issue 1, no. 814
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-7087-4
- Publisher
- BioMed Central
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Background: Although gender is an important determinant of health behaviour with males less likely to perform health-protective behaviours, samples in health behaviour research are heavily biased towards females. This study investigated the use of online social network, Facebook, to reach and recruit inactive males to a team-based, social, and gamified physical activity randomised controlled trial. Methods: Methodological techniques included a narrative literature review, survey of inactive males (n = 34) who rated advertisement images and text captions on scales of 1-10, and trial Facebook-delivered recruitment campaigns. Advertisement effectiveness was measured by cost-per-click to the study website, number of expressions of interest, and study enrolments from males. Results: Survey results showed that vibrant images of men exercising accompanied by concise captions (< 35 words) were most effective. An advertising campaign incorporating these components achieved a cost-per-click of $0.60, with 80% of n = 50 expressions of interest being from men, a marked improvement from baseline campaigns in which only 11% of expressions of interest were from men. Despite this, men who were recruited through the targeted campaign failed to enrol into the study, primarily due to reluctance to invite friends to join their team. An alternative strategy of encouraging females to invite men boosted male participation from 18% of the sample at baseline to 29% in the targeted recruitment phase. Conclusions: Evidence-based approaches can improve Facebook recruitment outcomes, however, there are complex barriers hindering male recruitment to health behaviour studies that may necessitate multi-faceted strategies including involvement of family and friends.
- Subject
- online social networks; male; men’s health; physical activity; randomised controlled trial; health behaviour; recruitment; Facebook
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1407107
- Identifier
- uon:35692
- Identifier
- ISSN:1471-2458
- Rights
- © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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