Surveying the experience of living with metastatic breast cancer: comparing face-to-face and online recruitment

With its growing use, the Internet offers researchers a novel approach in reaching those they seek to study locally, nationally or globally. The purpose of this paper is to describe our experience of using the Internet as one means of recruiting to a research study exploring the experience of women with metastatic breast cancer and to compare the methodological issues of using face-to-face and online approaches to survey recruitment. The survey incorporated the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Breast (FACT-B) quality of life measure, a patient experience with care measure and open ended text questions about respondents’ physical, emotional and practical needs. Recruitment was done face-to-face in two cancer centres and on the Breast Cancer Care (it is the UK’s leading provider of information, practical assistance and emotional support for anyone affected by breast cancer) Website, recruiting 110 people in the cancer centres and 125 from the Website. The age range was 25–84. Website respondents were significantly younger than cancer centre respondents (<0.000). They also had significantly lower social well-being on the FACT-B scale and were less satisfied with information and advice (<0.000) and their personal experience of care (<0.010). Finally, we consider the role of the Internet in research and the methodological and ethical challenges this presents both now and in the future