Recruiting participants via social media: advantages, disadvantages, ethical considerations

Increasingly we are using social media to recruit participants in research, particularly when the research questions embrace digital life. Yet there is very little guidance on how to do this or consideration of potential problems of using our existing social networks to recruit to research. I'm particularly interested in the ethical considerations and issues of managing researcher identity.

I would propose a discursive workshop where those who have worked on studies which have recruited participants via social media can talk about their experiences. I also have contacts from the Institute of Health and Society who we could invite to talk about some of the issues they have encountered in using social media to recruit participants to health studies.

We could also look at the draft guidelines being put together by the British Sociological Society's 'digital sociology' group and think about how suitable (or not) these are for HCI/digital economy/digital civics research.