LETTERS
Recruiting Researchers Through Facebook To the Editor: e have read with considerable interest Dr. Richiardi’s communication regarding the use of Facebook to recruit participants in the NINFEA study.1 As previous initiatives report, Facebook provides a positive virtual environment in which study participants can be enrolled and followed.1,2 As a widely used online social network, Facebook may be useful for other research purposes. We would like to share our experience in recruiting researchers through this website. In June 2011, our Collaborative Working Group for the Research of Human Resources for Health, RedLIRHUS (Grupo Colaborativo Latinoamericano para la Investigacio´n de Recursos Humanos en Salud), designed a multicenter study to explore the profile and professional expectations of Latin American medical students, with questions on topics such as emigration intention and primary-care labor perspectives. This study was conceived as a continent-wide evaluation, using a pilot tested3 self-administered survey. To gather these data, we decided to start the fieldwork by enrolling researchers from various countries in Latin America via Facebook. Given that medical students were the potential study subjects, we decided to involve them also as the local principal investigators. In October 2011, the project was approved by the Ethical Committee of the Instituto Nacional de Salud del Peru´. We started with a limited number of universities, but this situation was insufficient to achieve our objective. We, therefore, implemented a new recruiting strategy by posting an invitation on the “wall” of the local organizations’ Facebook pages (by country or university) of the Medical Students’ Scientific Societies (Sociedades Científicas de Estudiantes de Medicina)4 and similar groups, such as the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations.
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Overall, 80 researchers agreed to take part in this project; they represented 80 universities from 15 Latin American countries. Approximately half of these researchers were recruited by Facebook. Also, in October 2011, we created a Facebook “Closed Group,” called Red-LIRHUS, to connect all participant researchers (including those who were contacted using Facebook and those who were not). This group provided responses to common questions and included 95% of the participant researchers in their local universities. As our experience suggests, Facebook can be helpful in recruiting and communicating with a research team, even in a multinational context. Renee´ Pereyra-Elías Percy Mayta-Trista´n School of Medicine Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas Lima, Peru´
[email protected]
REFERENCES 1. Richiardi L, Pivetta E, Merletti F. Recruiting study participants through Facebook 关letter兴. Epidemiology. 2012;23:175. 2. Jones L, Saksvig BI, Grieser M, Young DR. Recruiting adolescent girls into a follow-up study: benefits of using a social networking website. Contemp Clin Trials. 2012;33:268 –272. 3. Mayta-Trista´n P, Carbajal-Gonzalez D, MezonesHolguín E, et al. Perspectivas profesionales e intencio´n de emigracio´n de los estudiantes de medicina de nueve países de Latinoame´rica, 2008: Estudio preliminar. CIMEL. 2010;15:3– 8. 4. Pereyra-Elías R, Rodríguez-Morales AJ, Mayta-Trista´n P. Undergraduate publication in Latin America: role of Medical Students’ Scientific Societies. Med Teach. 2011;33:594.
Benefits of Publicly Available Data To the Editor: he National Morbidity, Mortality, and Air Pollution Study (NMMAPS) was designed to examine the health effects of air pollution in the United States. The primary question was whether particulate matter was responsible for the associations between air pollution and daily mortality. Secondary questions concerned measurement error in air pollution and mortality displace-
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ment.1 Since then, NMMAPS has been used to answer many important questions in environmental epidemiology. The data from 108 US cities for the years 1987–2000 comprise daily observations of mortality counts in 3 age groups, air pollutants (including particulate matter and ozone), and weather (including temperature). The data were made publicly available first via the Web (http://www.ihapss. jhsph.edu/data/data.htm), and then via R.2 They were removed from public availability in 2011 due to privacy concerns. We used a systematic review to find peer-reviewed papers or reports that used the NMMAPS data. There were 67 papers or reports in total (see the eAppendix 关http://links.lww.com/EDE/A575兴 for the methods and a complete list). Thirty-three publications (49%) were based on the publicly available data (Table). The most common application was methodology (33 publications). The first authors came from 5 countries. Sixty-seven publications are a substantial research output from one study, reflecting the originality and scope of the data. The data have been used to answer questions on the health effects of air pollution and temperature in the United States, and to answer methodological questions. Such applications also create benefits outside the United States, as new and refined methods can be used in other countries. NMMAPS has been used to examine deaths during heat waves and to predict future heat-wave deaths due to climate change. Examining climate change was not an original goal of NMMAPS, but these data (which cover a wide range of climates over a
Supplemental digital content is available through direct URL citations in the HTML and PDF versions of this article (www.epidem.com). This content is not peer-reviewed or copy-edited; it is the sole responsibility of the author. Copyright © 2012 by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins ISSN: 1044-3983/12/2303-0500 DOI: 10.1097/EDE.0b013e31824d9ef7
Epidemiology • Volume 23, Number 3, May 2012
