Respondent-Driven Sampling is a widely-used method for sampling hard-to-reach human populations by link-tracing over their social networks. Inference from such data requires specialized techniques because the sampling process is both partially beyond the control of the researcher, and partially implicitly defined. Therefore, it is not generally possible to directly compute the sampling weights ...

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...

Respondent driven sampling (RDS) is a method often used to estimate population properties (e.g. sexual risk behavior) in hard-to-reach populations. It combines an effective modified snowball sampling methodology with an estimation procedure that yields unbiased population estimates under the assumption that the sampling process behaves like a random walk on the social network of the population....