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Social Media Recruitment for Adolescent Sexual Minority Males and Transgender Youth

at Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Recruiting and surveying lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth pose many challenges for researchers. Lack of disclosure to others and a still developing sexual identity create additional barriers to reaching youth. This paper discusses the feasibility of conducting a web survey using recruitment advertisements on social media platforms targeting adolescent sexual minority males age 13 to 18 years old and transgender youth age 13 to 24 years old for a survey of HIV prevention preferences. Respondents were recruited as part of the Survey of Today’s Adolescent Relationships and Transitions (START), a study that collects information about fundamental aspects of sexual identity, behavior, protective factors, and knowledge about and attitudes toward HIV prevention strategies. In order to capture youth who may be questioning their sexual identity as well as youth who identify as gay, bisexual, and transgender, recruitment ads were designed to attract both GBTQ youth and youth more generally. Advertisements were designed for three social media sites – Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, in addition to using Google Ad Words. Multiple sites were targeted to access a range of ages as well as ample representation of Black and Latino youth who are at especially high risk for HIV infection. Recruitment advertisements were designed in static pictures and video/audio formats tailored to the social media platforms based on the usage and preferences of youth. We discuss the final advertisements selected for each targeted group and those which performed the best in recruiting this hard-to-reach population. We then outline the challenges and lessons learned for recruiting on social media sites in order to contribute to a better understanding of the use of social media sites for survey recruitment as well as targeted ads for survey recruitment.