Social Work Commons^™

Challenges Of Virtual Rds For Recruitment Of Sexual Minority Women For A Behavioral Health Study, Deirdre Middleton, Laurie A. Drabble, Deborah Krug, Katherine J. Karriker-Jaffe, Amy A. Mericle, Tonda L. Hughes, Ronaldo Iachan, Karen F. Trocki

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is an approach commonly used to recruit nonprobability samples of rare and hard-to-find populations. The purpose of this study was to explore the utility of phone- and web-based RDS methodology to sample sexual minority women (SMW) for participation in a telephone survey. Key features included (i) utilizing a national probability survey sample to select seeds; (ii) web-based recruitment with emailed coupons; and (iii) virtual processes for orienting, screening, and scheduling potential participants for computer-assisted telephone interviews. Rather than resulting in a large diverse sample of SMW, only a small group of randomly selected women completed the survey …