Using Social Networking Sites in Subject Tracing

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace provide a novel method for tracing subjects in longitudinal research studies. This article describes how the southern site of the Longitudinal Studies of Child Abuse and Neglect (LONGSCAN) consortium used Facebook and MySpace to follow-up subjects inaccessible to traditional means of contact. A search conducted on both sites for the profiles of 151 subjects not located by traditional means yielded profiles belonging to 35 users, 7 of whom responded to our communication by agreeing to remain in the study, reducing the number of attritted subjects by 4.6%. The results suggest that Facebook and MySpace do carry potential as platforms for confidential tracing processes, although they may provide limited success when applied to a study’s most hard-to-locate subjects.