Sexual violence is pervasive in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Survivors of sexual violence encounter numerous challenges, and women with a sexual violence-related pregnancy (SVRP) face even more complex sequelae. Because of the stigma associated with SVRP, there is no conventional sampling frame and, therefore, a paucity of research on SVRP outcomes. Respondent-driven sampling (RD...

RDS is an increasingly popular chain-referral sampling method used to recruit samples of hidden and hard-to-reach populations. It seeks to provide a probability-based inferential structure for representations of population groups with status characteristics that are not likely to be revealed by omnibus survey research because they are rare and socially stigmatized and/or illegal. In RDS the tar...

BACKGROUND It has been argued that the success of respondent-driven sampling (RDS) in generating unbiased estimates for epidemiologic outcomes depends on participants' abilities to generate long referral chains. While this is thought to depend on the number of people participants know in the target population, this idea is rarely tested. Furthermore, little attention has been paid to the role o...

We study chain-referral methods for sampling in social networks. These methods rely on subjects of the study recruiting other participants among their set of connections. This approach gives us the possibility to perform sampling when the other methods, that imply the knowledge of the whole network or its global characteristics, fail. Chainreferral methods can be implemented with random walks o...

Is aimed at broadening Colombia's understanding of the social appropriation of science and technology, particularly the types of actors who promote initiatives in this sphere. Using a chain referral sampling methodology, a hundred such initiatives in Colombia were identified and documented, which were promoted by civil society, the State, business, the research community and mediators. The arti...

To recruit a sample of sexual minority women with diversity in regards to age and race, the Chicago Health and Life Experiences of Women study (CHLEW), a longitudinal study of sexual minority women’s health, used respondent driven (RDS) sampling. RDS, a refinement of chain referral sampling, uses initial participants or “seeds” recruited by the research team, to recruit the remainder of the pan...

Adequate surveillance of hard-to-reach and 'hidden' subpopulations is crucial to containing the HIV epidemic in low prevalence settings and in slowing the rate of transmission in high prevalence settings. For a variety of reasons, however, conventional facility and survey-based surveillance data collection strategies are ineffective for a number of key subpopulations, particularly those whose b...