Amelia Burke-Garcia*, Westat, Rockville, United States Track: Practice Presentation Topic: other Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: Mermaid Room: Room 4 - Queenshithe Date: 2013-09-24 04:00 PM – 04:45 PM Last modified: 2013-09-25

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Researchers across a variety of disciplines are challenged to implement effective social media strategies while adhering to research protocols and best practices. Because of acts like ‘Twitter bombing’, which refers to posting numerous Tweets with the same hashtags and other similar content from multiple accounts with the goal of advertising a certain meme and making it a trending topic on Twitter, validly of data in social media data can often be artificially skewed. Other challenges include privacy and data security, the ever-changing environment of social media, and the questionable representativeness of research samples and the generalisability of findings.
At a result of working with various US government agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) at the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), we have developed tactics that leverage the best of the social media ethos while adhering to relevant privacy and security requirements.
This presentation will elaborate the key findings from work carried out in the areas of 1) social research, 2) participant recruitment, 3) retention, 4) leveraging real-time data for predictive modeling of health issues, and 5) mobile surveys.