Innovative Recruitment Methods for Web 2.0 Hispanic Young Adults

Introduction: Project RED is a longitudinal study of the sociocultural predictors of alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use among Hispanic high school students in the Los Angeles area. We successfully followed a cohort of 1963 adolescents from 9th to 11th grade. In a follow-up study, we are locating these students and surveying them in emerging adulthood, to expand on our previous findings and explore the predictors of substance use, sexual risk behaviors, and violence during the transition from adolescence to emerging adulthood. In this presentation we discuss the different methods we employed in order to meet our recruitment goal for time-one follow-up (n=1200), as well as the relative success of these methods. Methods: We developed an innovative multifaceted recruitment strategy for our follow-up study to meet the challenge of recruiting a cohort of Hispanic young adults who have entered a residentially mobile phase of life. Our recruitment methods included calling, texting, emailing, using social networking sites, tracking participants using online search engines, and verifying address prior to initiating mailing efforts, as well as project assistant trainings and monitoring. Recruitment methods are compared by recruitment rates, demographic characteristics, and cost effectiveness. Results: The development and implementation of our multifaceted recruitment strategy has resulted in exceeding our recruitment goal for time-one follow-up (n=1250). Our most successful and cost effective methods were the use of social networking sites and texting. Discussion: We anticipate that our methods can be helpful to other investigators working with adolescent and emerging adult populations.