Assessing Data Quality and Inference in a Web Respondent Driven Sampling Study of Ethnic Minorities

Oregon Convention Center 

Web-based respondent driven sampling (W-RDS), an application of RDS, has potential to recruit hard-to-reach groups with strong social ties and a high Web access rate, such as certain racial/ethnic minority groups. However, little is known about the quality of W-RDS data and the performance of popular RDS estimators.
This study attempts to fill this gap with a national W-RDS study of Korean Americans, Health and Well-being of Koreans (HAWK). This study experimented on the seed types recruited from two sources: 1) social media; and 2) randomly selected addresses in the commercial data associated with Korean surnames. We will compare the HAWK sample estimates by seed type and against estimates for Korean Americans from the American Community Survey. In doing so, we will apply existing RDS estimators as well as model-based estimators to the HAWK data.

Respondent Driven Sampling

Web Survey

Statistical inference

Data quality

Model-based estimators

RDS estimators 

Survey Research Methods Section