Reddit Recruit of Women Refused Abortion or Contraception Due to Their Provider’s Conscientious Objection
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Date
2017-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Social media websites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) have been used to recruit hard-to-reach populations for research. One hard-to-reach population is women who are refused contraception or abortion care by a healthcare provider or pharmacist due to the professional’s moral or ethical beliefs constitute a hard-to-reach population. Restricting access to contraception can increase the rates of unintended pregnancy, which in turn are related to infant mortality and unsafe abortion. For a qualitative study, we used Reddit to recruit women who were denied reproductive healthcare in the last two years in the US. We chose this social media website for its anonymous nature and because of the topic’s sensitivity. To our knowledge, this is the first study to use Reddit to recruit participants for data collection. We recruited participants via 1) Reddit posts asking eligible women to respond through Reddit’s private messaging (PM) system and 2) PMs to Reddit users who had posted about an experience that involved being denied this care. For the first approach, we posted recruitment messages thirteen times on six ‘subreddits’ (Reddit pages dedicated to specific topics) at different times and days of the week during a five-month interval to reach as many women as possible. This approach yielded no interviews. For the second approach, we used key words in Reddit’s search function, which led us to identify posts from 13 potentially-eligible women. After messaging these women, three completed the interview. The use of “throwaway accounts,” accounts created solely to post something sensitive without associating it with a known account, might have negatively affected our ability to recruit. While posting a request for Reddit users to voluntarily respond through PM does not appear feasible, the second recruiting approach, in which potential participants were identified by searching posts, could be successful for recruiting hard-to-reach populations if sufficient numbers of existing posts were available.
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Keywords
Reproductive health, Women's health, Social media recruitment, Reddit