Hidden Populations, Online Purposive Sampling, and External Validity: Taking off the Blindfold

Hidden Populations, Online Purposive Sampling, and External Validity: Taking off the Blindfold

Online purposive samples have unknown biases and may not strictly be used to make inferences about wider populations, yet such inferences continue to occur. We compared the demographic and drug use characteristics of Australian ecstasy users from a probability (National Drug Strategy Household Surve...

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Veröffentlicht in:Field methods 2015-02, Vol.27 (1), p.3-21
Hauptverfasser: Barratt, Monica J., Ferris, Jason A., Lenton, Simon
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
Schlagworte:
Australia
Bias
Bootstrap mechanism
Demography
Drug Abuse
Ethnographic research
Ethnography
Fieldwork
Foreign Countries
Incidence
Internet
Meta Analysis
National Surveys
Nonparametric Statistics
Online Surveys
Probability
Sampling
Sociodemographic Factors
Statistical Inference
Validity
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Zusammenfassung:Online purposive samples have unknown biases and may not strictly be used to make inferences about wider populations, yet such inferences continue to occur. We compared the demographic and drug use characteristics of Australian ecstasy users from a probability (National Drug Strategy Household Survey, n = 726) and purposive sample (online survey conducted as part of a mixed-methods study of online drug discussion, n = 753) using nonparametric (bootstrap) and meta-analysis techniques. We found significant differences in demographics and drug use prevalence. Ideally, online purposive samples of hidden populations should be interpreted in conjunction with probability samples and ethnographic fieldwork.
ISSN:1525-822X
1552-3969
DOI:10.1177/1525822X14526838