Using Facebook as a Subject Recruitment Tool for Survey-Experimental Research

We consider the use of Facebook to recruit participants for online survey-experimental studies of public opinion. Based on two such studies we recently conducted, we discuss sample composition, attention to the task, and the possibility of rewarding participants through a lottery. We show that Facebook can be a cost-effective tool for rapidly recruiting large samples of participants anywhere in the world. These characteristics make it be particularly useful for recruitment of samples from elusive populations and in non-US settings – situations in which MTurk can be of little help