Older Adult Engagement With Facebook® Interventions: A Challenge for Nursing Research.
Debra Parker Oliver, Robin L Kruse, Kyle Pitzer and 6 others
PMID 35771068WHAT IT FOUND
Facebook stopped linking group activity to individual caregivers, so the team hand-counted 170 caregivers' posts, comments, likes and reactions.
Twenty-four had no engagement; seven were very active.
Key findings
01Individual posts and comments were no longer identified when data were extracted, so staff matched them to names on the Facebook page by hand.
02The engagement score counted posts and comments as 1 and likes or other reactions as 0.5, then divided the total by days the caregiver had the opportunity to engage.
03Among 170 caregivers, 24 (14.1%) had no engagement, 48 (28.2%) low, 45 (26.5%) moderate, 46 (27.0%) high, and 7 (4.1%) very high.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
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What it does not show
The paper reports how engagement was measured, not whether the Facebook group changed anxiety, depression or any other outcome. The literature review was informal and searched only PubMed and CINAHL for English studies from 2019 to 2021. Facebook stopped providing participant-level data, so the team had to download activity weekly and match names by hand. The team estimated that three research staff spent more than 300 hours computing the 170 engagement scores, and miscounting was possible. If a caregiver left the group and changed privacy settings, their data could disappear, so some information may have been lost. Reading or viewing without posting could not be counted, so participants with no engagement may still have read the group. The face validity check used a non-representative subsample of exit interviews, not the whole sample. The method was developed for one caregiver Facebook intervention and may not apply to other groups or populations.
Declared interests
The paper states the ACCESS study was funded by the National Cancer Institute in 2017; no other conflicts are reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these engagement scores as evidence that Facebook groups providing social support and education reduce anxiety or depression. The paper reports how participation was measured, not whether the group changed any outcome.