{"doi":"10.1371/journal.pone.0256074","title":"Experience and lessons learned from multi-modal internet-based recruitment of U.S. Vietnamese into research","abstract":"BACKGROUND: Asian-Americans are one of the most understudied racial/ethnic minority populations. To increase representation of Asian subgroups, researchers have traditionally relied on data collection at community venues and events. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has created serious challenges for in-person data collection. In this case study, we describe multi-modal strategies for online recruitment of U.S. Vietnamese parents, compare response rates and participant characteristics among strategies, and discuss lessons learned. METHODS: We recruited 408 participants from community-based organizations (CBOs) (n = 68), Facebook groups (n = 97), listservs (n = 4), personal network (n = 42), and snowball sampling (n = 197). Using chi-square tests and one-way analyses of variance, we compared participants recruited through different strategies regarding sociodemographic characteristics, acculturation-related characteristics, and mobile health usage. RESULTS: The overall response rate was 71.8% (range: 51.5% for Vietnamese CBOs to 86.6% for Facebook groups). Significant differences exist for all sociodemographic and almost all acculturation-related characteristics among recruitment strategies. Notably, CBO-recruited participants were the oldest, had lived in the U.S. for the longest duration, and had the lowest Vietnamese language ability. We found some similarities between Facebook-recruited participants and those referred by Facebook-recruited participants. Mobile health usage was high and did not vary based on recruitment strategies. Challenges included encountering fraudulent responses (e.g., non-Vietnamese). Perceived benefits and trust appeared to facilitate recruitment. CONCLUSIONS: Facebook and snowball sampling may be feasible strategies to recruit U.S. Vietnamese. Findings suggest the potential for mobile-based research implementation. Perceived benefits and trust could encourage participation and may be related to cultural ties. Attention should be paid to recruitment with CBOs and handling fraudulent responses.","journal":"PLoS ONE","year":2021,"id":177598,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":20,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9509,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":722598,"name":"Victoria N. Huynh","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":409626,"name":"Robert A. Bednarczyk","orcid":"0000-0002-9273-740X","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":356923,"name":"Cam Escoffery","orcid":"0000-0003-4445-009X","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":722599,"name":"Danny Ta","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":356924,"name":"Tien Thi Kieu Nguyen","orcid":"0000-0002-4603-4164","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":356922,"name":"Carla J. Berg","orcid":"0000-0001-8931-1961","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":356921,"name":"Milkie Vu","orcid":"0000-0003-0230-473X","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":79,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:47:32.096934Z","pmid":"34388178","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}