Community understanding of respondent-driven sampling in a medical research setting in Uganda: importance for the use of RDS for public health research

Abstract

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a widely-used variant of snowball sampling. Respondents are selected not from a sampling frame, but from a social network of existing members of the sample. Incentives are provided for participation and for the recruitment of others. Ethical and methodological criticisms have been raised about RDS. In this study RDS was used to recruit male household heads in rural Uganda. We investigated community members' understanding and experience of the method, and explored how these may have affected the quality of the RDS survey data. Our findings suggest that because participants recruit participants, the use of RDS in medical research may result in increased difficulties in gaining informed consent, and data collected using RDS may be particularly susceptible to bias due to differences in the understanding of key concepts between researchers and members of the community.

Keywords:

• respondent-driven sampling
• RDS
• qualitative
• Uganda
• public health
• method
• ethics
• informed consent

Acknowledgements

The authors would particularly like thank the study participants and staff at the MRC/UVRI. Uganda Research Unit on AIDS without whom this study would not have been possible. We are grateful to the Medical Research Council (UK), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (19790.01), and the EU FP7 (242061) for funding. RGW is funded by a Medical Research Council (UK) Methodology Research Fellowship (G0802414) and the consortium to Respond Effectively to the AIDS TB Epidemic, United States, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.