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25 April 2006

Sampling Strategy Online Forum

Hey there,

I am currently pre-testing an online survey, which I would like to launch in a couple of weeks.

However, the issue I am still struggling with is the sampling strategy. Let me briefly give you some background.

± My research objective is to identify information and advice networks in the online community. Besides a set of demographic/control questions, I ask the respondents to identify their three most important online community contacts (e.g., who comes to you to ask for information/advice AND whom do you turn to to ask for information/advice)

± The community has more than 80,000 registered users. However, the percentage of the really active members is assumed to be far below the latter figure (no clear figures exist). Furthermore, users of the community reported multiple identities of single users (several cases are known, where one user utilizes several aliases)

± There is – currently – not technically feasible/easy way of extracting a list of the most active network members, which might define the sample size for the survey (besides going on the website and manually scan through the forums etc).

± I originally planned to announce the survey and post the link to the survey on the homepage of the forum instead of sending the survey link to each member individually.

The question(s) I thus have is/are:

± How have other researchers solved the sampling issue in a similar type of situation?

± Have other studies tried to identify information and advice network with an ego-sampling strategy, where the exact sample size wasn’t known ex-ante? If yes, did they succeed or fail?

± What are the most relevant/important papers to look at with respect to sampling strategy/research methods of online surveys in online communities?

What do you think? Do you have any ideas?

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at April 25, 2006 12:32 AM

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