In this study, we collected mixed method social network data alongside a survey of people who inject drugs (PWID) to assess key assumptions of respondent-driven sampling (RDS). We found adherence to some assumptions and non-adherence to others. Specifically, sampling did occur through a connected network of PWID and the reported degree size of…

Conducting research among hard-to-reach populations is a difficult endeavor because some of their characteristics are known to be associated with survey nonresponse and panel attrition. In the case of the Parchemins study, which followed undocumented migrants over their process of regularization and during the first years of regularized life in…

A growing number of people live in apartments worldwide, and research into these contexts is key to the success of our cities. Recruiting apartment residents as research participants can be challenging, however, especially when using a case study approach. This research note outlines the participant recruitment method developed for case study…

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a methodology for sampling and analysing survey data from rare and elusive populations that has gained increasing attention in migration research in recent years. Since its introduction in 1997, it has been applied in numerous surveys in the field of epidemiology (mainly for the estimation of HIV/AIDS prevalence…

Constant changes to COVID-19 restrictions have required adaptability from social scientists including responding to new challenges such as infiltration by bots. This research note presents unexpected encounters of bot infiltration and recruitment during survey data collection under pandemic conditions. The note draws from a household survey on a…

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) resulted in South Africa's shelter-in-place lockdown. South Africa is vulnerable to the negative outcomes of COVID-19 due to health systems inequalities, high prevalence of human immunodeficiency viruses, tuberculosis and the growing burden of non-communicable diseases. Conducting scientifically…

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a survey method for hidden populations and, as such, it offers a suitable approach for sampling the homeless. Surprisingly, the practical use of RDS in surveying homeless populations has only sporadically been described in the professional literature so far, and the specifics of using RDS for sampling this group…

Growing health inequities have led to calls for population health intervention research that can contribute to improving the health of marginalized populations, but conducting research with these communities can be challenging. When research aims to examine and understand an aspect of health in a population characterized as hard-to-reach or…

Over the past decade, the number of advertised tenure-track faculty positions in higher education institutions in the United States and abroad has steadily declined while the competition for these positions has become fierce. This situation has caused some scholars to seek perspectives into the factors that influence the tenure-track faculty…

In the nearly two years since the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, multiple studies have documented declines in international student enrollments at U.S. institutions. Entities that track developments in higher education have reported increased enrollments in other countries, especially those where costs are lower, quality and access are…

This paper focuses on the meaning, classification and types of support staff, their contributions towards conducive teaching and learning environments, conditions required/attributes required for support staff to be employed in temporally or permanent terms. It further identifies current situations and challenges in recruitment and recruited…

Conducting qualitative research in any discipline warrants two actions: accessing participants and eliciting their ideas. In chemistry education research (CER), survey techniques have been used to increase access to participants and diversify samples. Interview tasks (such as card sorting, using demonstrations, and using simulations) have been…

The Green Paper "Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice" [BIS. 2015. Sheffield: Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.…

To better understand the status of the teaching profession, we present a conceptual framework outlining the 4 domains of knowledge-worker professionals: professional benchmarks, professional discretion, room for promotion, and workplace conditions and use the TALIS 2013 survey data to show that these domains exist globally and vary within…

Surveys are commonly used to determine how people feel about a specific issue. The increasing availability of the internet and popularity of social networking sites have opened up new possibilities for conducting surveys and, with limited additional costs, enlarge the pool of volunteer respondents with the desired background, experience, or…