Hi all,

there have been several discussions in this forum about implementing Respondent-Driven Sampling (RDS or WebRDS) with LimeSurvey, see e. g.:
Allow respondents to refer friends within a survey
Respondent-driven sampling on the internet (WebRDS)
 RDS is commonly used to recruit participants from network-based or hard-to-reach populations. The process starts with a number of initial participants (“seeds”). After participating, they receive a limited number of individual access codes that they can pass on to other eligible people. Those participants can subsequently recruit further participants, creating a traceable referral chain.

We recently implemented this workflow as a LimeSurvey plugin for one of our customers. The customer kindly agreed to make the resulting plugin available to the LimeSurvey community free of charge under the GNU license.

The plugin:

• works with closed-access surveys using a participant table;
• generates additional unique access tokens for each participant;
• stores these tokens in configurable participant attributes;
• supports referral chains across multiple recruitment waves;
• is compatible with LimeSurvey 6 and LimeSurvey 7.

The generated tokens can be displayed or distributed according to the specific survey design.The free plugin, documentation and a sample survey are available here:
Download Plugin

If your project requires a different workflow that is not covered by LimeSurvey core, we also develop individual LimeSurvey plugins:
Contact us

I hope this is useful for researchers looking to implement RDS or referral-based recruitment with LimeSurvey.