Enhancing the sample diversity of snowball samples: Recommendations from a research project on anti-dam movements in Southeast Asia
By Julian Kirchherr, Katrina J. Charles. PLoS ONE, 2018
623 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Snowball sampling is a commonly employed sampling method in qualitative research; however, the diversity of samples generated via this method has repeatedly been questioned. Scholars have posited several anecdotally based recommendations for enhancing the diversity of snowball samples. In this study, we performed the first quantitative, medium-N analysis of snowball sampling to identify pathways to sample diversity, analysing 211 reach-outs conducted via snowball sampling, resulting in 81 interviews; these interviews were administered between April and August 2015 for a research project on anti-dam movements in Southeast Asia. Based upon this analysis, we were able to refine and enhance the previous recommendations (e.g., showcasing novel evidence on the value of multiple seeds or face-to-face interviews). This paper may thus be of particular interest to scholars employing or intending to employ snowball sampling.
Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f85057378fc5fe5db56c5408d44acc8cfc13d674
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In Infectious Diseases
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Citations in the corpus
- Fake news and COVID-19: modelling the predictors of fake news sharing among social media users (2020, neutral): “Therefore, a recent study recommends the increase of a sample size to reduce bias selection in the online survey (Kirchherr & Charles, 2018).”
- Policies for transitioning towards a circular economy: Expectations from the European Union (EU) (2020, methodology): “Using a snowball method (Kirchherr and Charles, 2018; Handcock and Gile, 2011), interviewees were then asked to suggest interviewees not yet identified, yielding 11 referrals and seven additional interviews for a total of 47.”