Elisabeth Liebau, DIW Berlin
Matthias Schonlau, Rand Corporation and DIW Berlin
Abstract
Respondent driven sampling (RDS) is a sampling technique typically employed for hard-to-reach populations (e.g. injecting drug users, men having sex with men, and sex workers).
Briefly, initial seed respondents recruit additional respondents from their network of friends. The recruiting process repeats iteratively, thereby forming long referral chains.
It is crucial to obtain estimates of respondents' network size (e.g. number of friends with the characteristic of interest). RDS shares some similarities with snowball sampling, but the theoretical foundation for inference using RDS samples is much stronger. We will give a brief overview over this technique, studies that have used RDS and some of the challenges they encountered.
The presentation will be in German.