A social worker wants to investigate the phenomenon of resilience among street children who are accommodated in shelters or places of safety. She identifies three street children in Bloemfontein who dropped in at a NGO shelter and asks them to introduce her to other street children who also drops in at the shelter from time to time. This is an example of:

Question

a.
snowball sampling.

b.
stratified random sampling.

c.
systematic random sampling.

d.
cluster sampling.

Answer 1

The scenario described is an example of:

a. snowball sampling.

In snowball sampling, existing study subjects recruit future subjects from among their acquaintances. This is often used in populations that are hard to access, such as street children, where initial subjects can help identify and connect the researcher with other potential participants.