Snowball Subject Recruitment

Snowball subject recruitment, which can also be referred to as snowball sampling or chain referral and is associated with respondent driven sampling, is used as a method to recruit participants in a research study. In this recruitment strategy, a participant recruits people he or she knows to be in the study, those new participants then recruit people they know to be in the study, and so on. This technique is referred to as snowball subject recruitment because, much like a snowball is made, as the participants share contacts, more participants are added to the study and there is an accumulation of participants over time. Snowball sampling is a nonrandom sampling technique, similar to convenience sampling, wherein there is not an equal chance for all participants ...