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Practical Research 1 Qualitative Research Design and Sampling Techniques
Practical Research 1 Qualitative Research Design and Sampling Techniques
1. Convenience Sampling
This is the most common form of qualitative sampling, and it occurs
when people are invited to participate in the study because they are
conveniently (opportunistically) available with regard to access, location,
time, and willingness. Convenience sampling is a relatively fast and easy
way to achieve the sample size needed for the study. While it may be the
most common form of sampling in qualitative research, the main
limitation of using convenience sampling is that it could suffer from
either under-representation or over-representation of particular groups
within the population.
2. Purposive Sampling
Purposive sampling is a popular approach in qualitative research.
Participants are recruited according to pre-selected criteria relevant to
the research aims/questions of a given study. Purposive sampling is
designed to provide information-rich cases as participants are those who
have the required status, experience, or knowledge of interest to the
researcher.
Two further types of sampling sit under the umbrella of purposive
sampling; quota sampling and maximum variation sampling. In quota
sampling, the researcher decides on both the number of participants
required and the characteristics of interest. These may be age, gender,
profession, diagnosis, ethnicity, and so forth. The population is
segmented into the groups of interest, for example, men under the age
of 45 years and men >45 years. The researcher would then select men
from each group to represent the proportion of each group in the wider
population. If the desired sample size was 20 men and the proportion of
men >45 years in the population was 75%, then the sample would
consist of 5 men under 45 years and 15 men >45 years. Quota sampling
is therefore more specific with respect to representing proportions of the
sub-samples of interest in a given research study. Maximum phenomena
variation sampling is an approach used to ensure that the full range and
extent of the phenomena are represented—such as ensuring people who
are experiencing mild symptoms in relation to a particular condition are
included as well as those experiencing severe symptoms (and all those
in-between).
3. Snowball Sampling
Also known as ‘chain referral’ or ‘networking’ sampling, snowball
sampling occurs when the researcher starts gathering information from
one or a small number of people and then requests to put the researcher
in touch with others who may be friends, relatives, colleagues, or other
significant contacts. This type of sampling is especially useful in
recruiting ‘hidden populations’, for example, marginalized or stigmatized
individuals, where those individuals are not easily accessible to
researchers, such as drugusers, prostitutes, or those not registered with
a medical practice (Babbie 2014).
Some limitations of snowball sampling are that the researcher
needs to rely on referrals from initial contacts to generate additional
participants. The participants, therefore, are often not considered to be
representative of the overall population being studied.
4. Theoretical Sampling
This form of sampling is mostly used in grounded theory studies but is
increasingly being used to gather data for the purpose of theory
generation. The research starts from a homogeneous (small) sample and
moves to a heterogeneous (larger) sample (Babbie 2014). Sampling
occurs sequentially and alongside data analysis. Analyzed data guides
the areas to be explored further in the next round of data collection and
the focus of the sample in order to achieve this. The initial participants
are usually purposively chosen or conveniently available.