Hi there,

Martin Blais, professor in the department of Sexology at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM) and his co-researchers are working on a SSHRC-funded Canada-wide study, and participant recruitment will take place using respondent-driven sampling on the internet.

In case you are unfamiliar with RDS, here is a short description: First, we select seed participants, who will receive a Respondent Serial Number. Once the seeds complete the questionnaire, they are asked to identify 3 eligible participants from their social networks. The site should be able to send an automated invitation to each of the three persons (via email, text-message or to copy-paste the personalized message to send it by Facebook messenger, etc.). All recruits then become new seeds (wave 2), and so. All respondents, seeds and recruits, have to be attributed (automatically) two serial numbers to follow the referral chain + metadata:

· Respondent Serial Number - Serial number of the coupon the respondent was recruited with.

· Respondent's Recruiting Serial Numbers - Serial numbers from the coupons the respondent is given to recruit others.

· Number of coupons given

The serial number attribution has to be completely managed by an algorithm. We need to be able to adjust ad hoc the number of coupons for specific sub-populations with slower growth rate. The purpose of (web)RDS is to be able to follow the referral-chain to weight the sample to compensate for its non-probabilistic design. This is better than convenience sampling for hard-to-reach and hidden population (without any known population parameters like those that a census would give us).

We are still in the process of setting everything up, and we were wondering if LimeSurvey offered a service that would make all of this possible. We have been struggling to find a person who could do it for us. We have a budget for this task, and are looking to hire help.

Thank you!

Léa

Léa Séguin
PhD(c) en Sexologie; Assistante de recherche
MSc Family Relations and Human Development
Département de Sexologie
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM)
Faculté des Sciences Humaines
455 René Levesque Est, local W-R270
Montréal, QC, H2L 4Y2

I am sure this will require quite some custom coding, I think. Not the research part, but the sampling part.

You might want to get in touch with the user Tpartner, he might be able to help you (and he is from Canada, afaik)

Hi Lea,

My name is Samuel and I am from Brazil. I am currently working on a research on which we intente to use WebRDS on Lime Survey. Did you find out if it is possible? If yes, would you give me some advices or pathways?

Thank you so much.

Regards,

Samuel