[Air-L] Sampling and recruiting in Social Networking Services

[Fred Stutzman]

The only article I've seen out of a methods journal that deals with  
this directly appeared recently:

Ferguson, D. A.  (2009).  Name-Based Cluster Sampling.  Sociological  
Methods & Research, 37(4), 590-598.

Drawing on memory, most of the within-SNS sampling I've seen, for  
small sample studies, uses either snowball or invitation sampling.   
I've also seen use of advertising (both through paid placement and ad  
hoc methods - groups, reposting of solicitation).  For large-scale  
samples, I've seen both randomized and targeted crawling of a SNS.   
Mike Thelwall's papers on Myspace provide a good example.

Notably, most of the medium-sized samples involve extra-SNS  
solicitation (generally some sort of list-based sample).  This is  
mainly used for survey research.



On Jun 18, 2009, at 12:05 AM, Monica Barratt wrote:

> Did you ever get a response to this? I'm also interested.
>
> I'm writing up my experiences of recruiting for research using online
> bulletin board / forums. I also used Facebook but not extensively. I  
> imagine
> there would be some interesting methodological and ethical questions  
> to
> consider through these modes of recruitment.
>
> Monica
>
> 2009/2/6 Alexander Semenov <semenoffalex at googlemail.com>
>
>> Hello everybody,
>> I'm interested in any information about sampling and recruiting  
>> people in
>> SNS to participate in any kind of online surveys, panels,  
>> questionnaires
>> etc. After some googling I've found only several blog postings,  
>> like this
>> ones:
>>
>> http://kurtisrandom.blogspot.com/2007/11/sampling-massive-online-social-networks.html
>>
>> http://vannevarvision.wordpress.com/2007/10/04/review-analysis-of-topological-characteristics-of-huge-online-social-networking-services/
>>
>> http://researchreinvented.blogspot.com/2007/12/recruiting-using-social-networks.html
>> But I wonder whether there are any "serious" articles on the  
>> question?
>> Thanks in advance.
>> Alexander Semenov.
>> _______________________________________________
>> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
>> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http:// 
>> aoir.org
>> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:
>> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>>
>> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
>> http://www.aoir.org/
>>
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/
>


--
Fred Stutzman
Ph.D. Student and Teaching Fellow
School of Information and Library Science, UNC-Chapel Hill
fred at fredstutzman.com | (919) 260-8508 | http://fredstutzman.com/