What sampling method is the <span title="following..................">following...................</span>

Question

I distributed a questionnaire via email to people I knew via email, and asked them to pass it on to others....is this a random sampling approach?

Answer 1

No, it is certainly not random. What you&#039;ve done is called a snowball sample, so named because it&#039;s like starting with a small bit of snow (the people you know) and rolling it down a hill, with the snowball growing on its own as it rolls along.

It&#039;s important to remember that randomness has a different meaning in the context of survey research than it does in everyday usage. Randomness is a very good thing with a fairly specific definition. In everyday conversation, people say something is random when it is haphazard, unplanned, disorganized, or unexpected. As a technical term, which is what you&#039;re interested in here, randomness means that outcomes are determined by chance alone. In the more specific context of sampling for a survey, it means each member of the population has an equal chance of being selected. This is difficult to do, but it&#039;s possible to get close. What you&#039;ve done is biased towards people you know, who are not likely to be representative of the general population. For example, you&#039;re running a pretty big risk of getting a lot of people in your general age group, geographic area, occupational sector, and so on.

This is not a very good way to draw a sample, but that doesn&#039;t have anything to do with the internet per se, just the fact that you&#039;re not going to get a representative group of respondents. That being said, plenty of people have conducted useful research this way, so it&#039;s not the end of the world. Just be careful to acknowledge the limitations of your sampling procedure when writing up and discussing your results. Also, depending on the nature of your questions, you might be able to supplement your information with data from an existing survey that has drawn a random sample.

Answer 2

Yes it is random. Unfortunately internet surveys are not deemed to be very reliable by marketing researchers. Maybe because people are not always being honest or  they answer in a joking manner to get a laugh.