Snowball selection
The snowball selection or snowball method is a special sampling method in the social sciences.
It is used when statements about very special populations have to be made. It is used to find participants in numerically very small or difficult-to-reach groups of people, such as drug users, gamblers or experts in a very small field. A person in such a group, i.e. an element of the population who takes part in the survey, passes the questionnaires on to other people in their network or arranges participation in the survey. Although the results of such a selection process cannot be generalized, it does provide initial access to such a group.
The method offers simple and inexpensive access to groups of people who cannot be adequately reached with a random sample. In addition to the lack of representativeness, there are practical problems as well as problems with data protection, as names and contact details have to be saved.
literature
- Gabler, Siegfried. "Snowball Approach and Allied Sample Designs." (1992).
- Fuchs, Marek. "Surveying a Rare Population. The Snowball Method in a CATI Study." Hüfken, Volker (ed.): Methods in telephone surveys. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag (2000): 65-88.
- Wienold, H. "Snowball Procedure." Lexicon for Sociology 3 (1994): 588.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Michael Häder: Empirical social research. An introduction . VS Verlag , Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 3-531-14010-8 .
- ^ Dieter Roth: Empirical election research. Origin, Theories, Instruments and Methods . 2nd Edition. VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15786-3 , p. 70 .