RESUMEN
BACKGROUND: Effective participant recruitment strategies are crucial to the success of research studies. A targeted, well-designed recruitment plan provides researchers with a rich bed of information to fully explore research questions and achieve statistically significant responses. AIM: To discuss the importance and methodology of participant recruitment in achieving reliability and validity, and to provide an example of a recent study that used Facebook to recruit participants and achieve statistically significant findings. DISCUSSION: A targeted Facebook recruitment campaign was highly successful in attracting qualified participants who could provide essential information relevant to the study's research questions. A series of Facebook posts strategically targeted the population of interest and presented them with a short, ten-minute survey. It resulted in responses from 175 qualifying participants, achieving a statistical significance greater than 90%. CONCLUSION: Successful recruitment strategies must provide access to the population of interest and in sufficient numbers to provide a good representative sample of the population of interest for the study. Facebook provides efficient cost-effective access to target populations. IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE: As communication technology advances, nurse researchers must learn to adapt to the changing avenues of communication to reach potential study participants. Effective recruitment and a good representative sample is the key to reliability, validity and transferability of research findings.