Question

how you calculate: how many stages for 100 interview, at snowball sampling?

Answer 1

Snowball sampling consists of two steps -

1. Identify potential subjects in the population. Often, only one or two subjects can be found initially.
2. Ask those subjects to recruit other people (and then ask those people to recruit. Participants should be made aware that they do not have to provide any other names.

Here, we need to have 100 interviews. Now, it entirely depends on the number of subjects recruited initially.

Suppose, the person who started it have taken 1 interview and recruited that candidate for taking interviews along with him. They will be following this.

Now, there are 2 people to take interviews. These 2 will take 2 interviews and then there will be total of 4 now, and then they will take 4 interviews.

It will follow the pattern of 2**0 + 2**1 + 2**2 + 2**3 + 2**4 + 2**5 + .......

Find till we get the sum of 100

2**0 + 2**1 + 2**2 + 2**3 + 2**4 + 2**5 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32 + 64 > 100

There will be 7 stages for 100 interview, at snowball sampling.