Participant recruitment through social media

What is it about?

Social media can be useful when recruiting hidden populations for research. In our research on youth and radicalization, we found and contacted young people with extreme ideals through Facebook. In this article, we discuss our experiences using Facebook as a tool for finding respondents who do not trust researchers. Facebook helped us recruit youths with extreme Islamic and extreme left-wing ideals. We discuss the benefits and limitations of using Facebook when searching for and approaching populations who are difficult to reach.

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