Online Sample Recruitment Using Facebook: Evidence from Emerging Markets

• In Event: Advances in Experimental Methods and Designs Across the Subfields

Abstract

As internet and cell phone use spread, a growing number
of citizens in developing countries are getting online and using social media. Can social media platforms provide a cheaper, faster, and reliable mechanism to reach populations that are currently expensive to survey in comparative-politics research contexts? While the use of these online platforms to recruit subjects has been well documented in the US and Europe, there is less evidence on whether these platforms can also be used to reach diverse respondents in developing countries. This paper explores the use of targeted Facebook ads to recruit online survey takers in three developing country contexts: Kenya, Mexico, and Indonesia. We compare estimates of demographics, attitudes, and self-reported behaviors between our Facebook-recruited samples with censuses and nationally representative samples collected through in-person and online surveys. We find that Facebook can serve as a successful respondent recruitment mechanism, even in rural areas of developing countries. It is also orders of magnitude cheaper than national quota samples purchased from online survey providers and in-person surveys. We provide practical information about how to conduct stratified sampling with Facebook ads, outline best practices to improve data quality, and highlight important limitations to consider when conducting online surveys and experiments in contexts with varying levels of literacy.

Authors

• Leah R Rosenzweig, Stanford University

• Parrish Bergquist, Georgetown University

• Matto Mildenberger, University of California Santa Barbara

• Katherine Elizabeth Hoffmann Pham, New York University Stern School of Business

• Francesco Rampazzo