The Internet: Ensuring a representative demographic sample

An immediate thought of many researchers when considering advertising to the Internet population is that their sample may not be representative of the normal population. They imagine an over representation of younger, white, middle class, well educated, predominantly male volunteers. This perception may deter researchers from employing on-line recruitment methods, particularly if demographic factors are a crucial element to the studies design. This short article will bring some considerations to focus regarding recruiting representative samples over the Internet.

Recruitment from the Internet versus traditional methods

The Internet population will indeed likely differ from a selected geographic population of interest. Documented reports of on-line exclusive participant recruitment methods found that their participants were more likely to be white, middle-aged, highly educated, and with a high socioeconomic status (Im & Chee, 2004; Fawcett & Buhle 1995).  However, numerous reports from clinical trials that employ traditional recruitment methods describe a very similar disproportion among volunteers. More specifically, volunteers are generally less likely to have low income, low education and health awareness, greater age, and be of a non-white race. (Gull & Ali, 2010; Patel, Doku & Tennakoon, 2003). Overall, it appears that individuals who are more likely to participate in research are also more likely to be regular Internet users. As such, it appears that excluding Internet methods of recruitment may not offer any significant benefits in this regard. On the contrary, including Internet recruitment may actually assist in achieving a representative sample.

Benefits of an on-line recruitment portal

Internet applications can often provide simple tools that cannot be feasibly parallelled with traditional techniques. In this regard, Getparticipants.com provides a tool where multiple recruitment groups can be assigned to each study listing. Each group can be defined by unique demographic parameters, and a total number of applicants from each group can ensure that the researchers has complete control over the demographic distribution of applicants.

For example, to recruit a sample of n=100 with an even gender balance, one could recruit two groups:

Group 1) Males, 50 applicants maximum

Group 2) Females, 50 applicants maximum.

References

Eun-Ok Im, Wonshil Chee. Recruitment of Research Participants Through the Internet. Computers, Informatics, Nursing. 2004;22(5)
Fawcett J, Buhle EL Jr. Using the Internet for data collection. An innovative electronic strategy. Comput Nurs. 1995;13(6):273–279
Gul, R.B., Ali, P.A. Clinical trials: The challenge of recruitment and retention of participants. Journal of Clinical Nursing. 2010; 19(1):227-233
Patel, M. X., Doku. V., Tennakoon. L. Challenges in recruitment of research participants. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment. 2003; 9; 229-238