SOCI 3700 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Snowball Sampling, Nonprobability Sampling, Focus Group

• School: University of Georgia
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOCI 3700
• Professor: Edgemon

Document Summary

Conducting an interview study: deciding whom to interview. Researchers must first decide whether they are seeking informants or respondents. An informant has special knowledge about the research question, based on their social or professional position. A respondent is simply an ordinary person who is being interviewed. Researchers use case-study logic to select a sample for an interview study. They may use purposive sampling to consider informants who can offer a unique or expert perspective on the topic being studied, and will typically sample for range. Snowball sampling is the most commonly used sampling strategy for in-depth interviews. When using this sampling strategy, the researcher starts with one respondent who meets the requirement for inclusion and then asks him or her to recommend other people to contact. Saturation is a rule of thumb used by researchers to decide when they have learned all they can from an interview study.