The Wikipedia article on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_sampling
It would just seem to be far too easy for advocacy groups to hijack even a well intentioned selection, which is what I suspect we are seeing here. Instead of getting a diversity of viewpoints we are simply getting one, that will then in turn be referenced by the same groups as a result of "research". Simon On 27.07.2017 10:06, Dan S wrote: > 2017-07-27 8:57 GMT+01:00 Simon Poole <si...@poole.ch>: >> PS: you do illustrate an interesting point wrt the research we are >> discussing here, one would expect an unbiased sample of OSM contributors >> of size 15 to contain zero non-male and zero HOT members obviously the >> composition of the interviewees was rather different. > A uniform random sample is not really relevant in small-numbers > sociological research. This is "snowball sampling" which is a very > problematic form of sampling, but one thing it definitely does not > claim is to be a balanced random sample. A social researcher using > snowball sampling to find a small number of interviewees knows full > well they aren't gathering a statistically random sample, and one > hopes that this researcher tried to find a diversity of viewpoints for > his interviews (I don't know). He could, for example, have > deliberately designed his sample to have almost-equal numbers of men > and women. > > Best > Dan _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
