Participant recruitment

It was initially anticipated that around 20 participants would be recruited to take part in the questionnaire through targeted emails and online requests to appropriate groups. It had been hoped that EDINA site representatives – a diverse group of staff members, often librarians, at around 600 Higher and Further Education institutions across the UK - would form part of this cohort. However participants were initially recruited through convenience sampling of my own extended personal and professional social networks.

The questionnaire was launched on Monday 17th October 2011 and initially distributed to my own network through three social media spaces, Twitter, Facebook and Google+[1]. At the time of launching the questionnaire I had approximately 1100 followers on Twitter (by comparison I had 282 connections on Facebook, and approximately 90 on Google+) and the request for participation was swiftly re-shared to a much larger network of contacts and extended networks, with over fifty retweets.

Figure 1: Tweet[2] sent out to recruit potential research participants.

Statistics for, Bit.ly[3] (Fig. 1), a web service used to create a shortened URL[4] for the questionnaire, showed that over 140 individuals had clicked on the URL from either the Twitter website or Twitter clients[5]. By contrast just 7 clicks resulted from the link shared on Facebook. Google+ is not reflected in the statistics but may be included in the 18 “Email Clients, IM, AIR Apps, and Direct” clicks.

Figure 2: Bit.ly statistics for the Questionnaire URL, shared in requests to participate (captured in August 2012 via http://bit.ly/rmCTes+). Note: “t.co” refers to Twitter’s own URL-shortener, indicating referrals from Twitter. Referrals from TweetDeck and Hootsuite may originate in either Twitter or Facebook.

This rapid re-sharing meant that two days after launch the questionnaire had been attempted 79 times and 36 completed surveys had been received. After examining the responses received I decided not to recruit further participants but kept the survey available until the original closing date of 9^th December 2011. In total 47 questionnaires were completed with a further 51 incomplete questionnaire attempts. Three questionnaires were omitted from analysis due to incomplete consent forms findings presented are therefore based upon 44 responses.

[1] Google+ is Google’s Social Network Site: https://plus.google.com/

[2] Original tweet: http://twitter.com/#!/suchprettyeyes/status/125934305686986752.

[3] Bit.ly is a web tool for shortening URLs also providing tracking for use of those URLs: http://bitly.com. Bit.ly records each click on the shortened URL.

[4] Bit.ly statistics on the launch tweet: https://bitly.com/rmCTes+

[5] “twitter clients” refers to third party software appliactions that access and display Twitter data and functionality.

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