Experiences of respondent-driven sampling in online research among men who have sex with men in other countries (literature review)

Abstract

The proposed article describes the global experience of adapting the RDS (respondent-driven sample) methodology, used as a de facto standard in large-scale quantitative studies of social groups, to the world of web communications. The experience accumulated in global practice allows us to state that WebRDS is faster and cheaper, provides a greater diversity of the research population and the possibility of recruiting simultaneously at several sites without extensive contacts in local communities, works in countries with very different income levels of the population, and can be combined with traditional RDS, and other survey methods (e.g., with telephone survey). At the same time, WebRDS has its own characteristics, among which we note the vulnerability to fraud, the sensitivity of the response rate to the size of the questionnaire, the presence of biases caused by access to the Internet or mobile connection and the habit of using online tools, not always full control of the research team over the use of the collected data with the help of third-party Internet data platforms, as well as higher requirements for the technical competence of both researchers and ethics committees, etc. In Ukraine, the prerequisites for successfully implementing WebRDS have been created. Considering the challenges that have arisen due to the occupation of part of the territories and the large-scale migration of the population, it seems appropriate to adapt the available foreign experience in implementing such a recruiting system to the practice of biobehavioral research of vulnerable groups in Ukraine.