[Air-l] Using LinkedIn for survey sample

[elw at stderr.org]

> Subject: [Air-l] Using LinkedIn for survey sample
> 
> Has anyone recruited survey participants from a social network (e.g., 
> LinkedIn)? I'm looking at recruitment possibilites for a dissertation on 
> organizational behavior (motivation to lead and moral philosophy). It 
> occurred to me that LinkedIn might be a good resource for a sample of 
> professionals, but I'm not sure of the privacy/ethical aspect. Any 
> thoughts or experiences?

less from the privacy/ethical aspect, but more from the practical 
aspect...

1) does LinkedIn's terms of service (TOS) allow you to use their data in
    this fashion?  Your IRB should probably study that document carefully
    as part of your project approval...

2) LinkedIn is somewhat self-selecting - in that you get a very particular
    set of folks, with a particular set of goals, signing up for it.

3) difficulty of accounting for bias in your sample.  how're you going to
    explain your sampling strategy, and what defenses will you use in
    discussing it with people who care about that sort of thing?

4) data collection issues - how're you going to extract this data that you
    want, and where're you going to stick it?  IIRC LinkedIn doesn't have
    an API as such, and so hiring a programmer to write a cool little
    crawler for it in an afternoon is a pretty substantial investment of
    time, energy, and dollars.

5) can you really get at organizational structures from the (very
    limited, in terms of information available at linkedin.com...) data
    available on the folks that you sample out?


Anyway... these are the things that come to mind fairly immediately. 
There's research out there about sampling from incomplete networks; some 
of that should prove most instructive as you work out your ideas...

--elijah