Cornwell Benjamin, Schneider John A
Department of Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States of America.
Departments of Medicine & Public Health Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2017 Aug 23;12(8):e0181494. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0181494. eCollection 2017.
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 of other aspects of social connectedness in recruitment, such as participants' involvement in local clubs and venues.
We examine whether the recruitment potential of young Black men who have sex with men (YBMSM) depends on (1) their social network size and (2) their affiliations with a variety of sex venues across geographic areas. We analyze data from a 2014 RDS study of 598 YBMSM on the south side of Chicago.
Both a participant's personal network size and the number of different types of sex venues with which he was affiliated were significantly positively associated with (1) the total number of recruits in the participant's prospective referral chains and (2) the lengths of those chains. However, only venue affiliation remain significantly associated with recruitment potential in the multivariate model.
The success of RDS in generating valid samples may depend more on recruiting participants who are involved in multiple venues within the community (i.e., their affiliation networks) than on recruiting those who have large personal social networks.
有人认为，应答驱动抽样（RDS）在生成无偏倚的流行病学结果估计值方面的成功取决于参与者生成长推荐链的能力。虽然人们认为这取决于参与者在目标人群中认识的人数，但这一观点很少得到验证。此外，在招募过程中，很少有人关注社会联系的其他方面所起的作用，比如参与者对当地俱乐部和场所的参与情况。
我们研究了与男性发生性关系的年轻黑人男性（YBMSM）的招募潜力是否取决于（1）他们的社交网络规模，以及（2）他们在不同地理区域与各种性场所的联系。我们分析了2014年对芝加哥南区598名YBMSM进行的一项RDS研究的数据。
参与者的个人网络规模以及他所关联的不同类型性场所的数量，均与（1）参与者预期推荐链中的招募总数以及（2）这些链条的长度显著正相关。然而，在多变量模型中，只有场所关联与招募潜力仍显著相关。
RDS在生成有效样本方面的成功，可能更多地取决于招募那些参与社区内多个场所活动的参与者（即他们的关联网络），而不是招募那些拥有庞大个人社交网络的人。
