Using Instagram to Engage Adolescent Women in Maternal Health Research

Full Description: The voices and perspectives of young adults are often left out of maternal health research because researchers have weak channels for connecting with young adults. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the closing of in-person schools, groups, and clubs where young people meet, which made standard strategies for outreach to young people for participation in research studies even more difficult to implement. A team of NYC youth representatives worked with researchers at the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (NYC-DOHMH) to implement a research study with young women (i.e., ages 13 to 20) in NYC using the social media platform, Instagram.

This poster will describe the process and outcome of translating an existing focus group-based research study into an Instagram-based research study using images, text, reposts, stories and live polls to engage over 7,000 young women across NYC. This poster will describe how the team implemented outreach to young women across NYC, and present questions from the original focus group protocol alongside the translated “image-based” posts and stories that were shared on Instagram. The poster will also share analytics of engagement in the form of comments, likes, and shares with various question posts. The poster will describe the strengths, challenges and lessons learned implementing maternal health research using this novel research method. This poster can be informative for other researchers seeking to engage youth voice through a social media platform.

Abbreviated Description: The voices of young adults are often left out of maternal health research. Youth representatives worked with researchers at the New York Academy of Medicine and the NYC DOH to implement a research study with young women (i.e., ages 13 to 20) in NYC using the social media platform, Instagram. This poster will describe the process and outcome of translating an existing focus group-based research study into an Instagram-based research study using images, text, reposts, stories and live polls to engage over 7,000 young women across NYC. The poster will describe the strengths, challenges and lessons from implementing maternal health research using this novel research method and can be informative for researchers seeking to engage youth voice through a social media platform.