Snowballing contacts does introduce a risk of bias but that is mitigated by the disciplinary and geographic spread in the target sample.
Is there any chance you guys could share information about the trees of who recommended who, to help get a sense of how big this bias could be? Like, how large was the largest recommendation chain, what fraction of people were recommended vs initially contacted, etc?
There were six people of 168 respondents who came via people some of the authors already knew or snowballing. I don’t think this would have much effect on the overall picture of the results
Is there any chance you guys could share information about the trees of who recommended who, to help get a sense of how big this bias could be? Like, how large was the largest recommendation chain, what fraction of people were recommended vs initially contacted, etc?
There were six people of 168 respondents who came via people some of the authors already knew or snowballing. I don’t think this would have much effect on the overall picture of the results
Correction my apologies. Apparently 30 respondents were snowballed from 17 others. We’ll look into how this affects the results
Thanks!