Snowball Sampling
Definition
A chain-referral technique in which each recruited respondent is asked to name or introduce others who share the trait the study is investigating, building the sample outward from a small starting group.
Related terms
- Gatekeeper
- A person or institution, such as a prison superintendent, police officer or community elder, who controls a researcher's access to a setting...
- Hidden Population
- A group with no enumerable sampling frame and a stigmatised or illegal status that gives its members an incentive to avoid being...
- Respondent-Driven Sampling
- A variant of chain referral, developed by Douglas Heckathorn in 1997, that tracks who recruited whom and each respondent's network size so...
- Sampling Frame
- The list or description of all units from which the sample can be drawn. Any unit not on the frame cannot be...
- Selection Bias
- A distortion that arises when the group being studied is not a random sample of the wider population; in Neighbourhood Watch research,...