MHealth resources for asthma and pregnancy care: methodological issues and social media recruitment. A discussion paper

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:sec><jats:title>Aims</jats:title><jats:p>A discussion of methodological issues and social media recruitment to a feasibility study to investigate mHealth resources for asthma and pregnancy care.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Background</jats:title><jats:p>Pregnant women with asthma are reported to be poorly supported according to an international research. We sought to establish if a mHealth intervention might be feasible and acceptable to them.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Design</jats:title><jats:p>A Phase I or modelling study.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Methods</jats:title><jats:p>A project team designed an intervention to address UK national guidelines for the management of asthma during pregnancy, using other resources already accessible on the web. This was made available on a project website optimized for mobile phone usage. Links were Tweeted and advertised on Facebook, asking participants to access the project website, which included links to the resources and before‐ and after‐use questionnaires to establish baseline symptom data and participant views of the resources.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Results</jats:title><jats:p>Despite 55,700 Twitter impressions in a 76‐day period over winter 2016–2017, this recruitment strategy garnered 402 engagements but only seven respondents for questionnaire 1 and zero respondents for questionnaire 2.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Conclusions</jats:title><jats:p>We could not recruit to this study despite believing that social media recruitment would be effective and we recommend that social media recruitment be used cautiously. Apparently, we did not sufficiently address the theoretical aspects of communications theory and were not clear enough about our key messages. Publication bias may exist about the non‐publication of other failed telemedicine studies using social media; this goes largely unreported in some systematic reviews and may influence researchers’ decision‐making about social media recruitment.</jats:p></jats:sec>