Beyond Surveillance: A Role for Respondent-driven Sampling in Implementation Science

Beyond surveillance: a role for respondent-driven sampling in implementation science.

We are now in the fourth decade of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) pandemic. Several novel prevention tools have been identified, and prevalence and incidence have declined in many settings. A remaining challenge is the delivery of preventive interventions to hard-to-reach populations, including men who have sex with men and injection drug users. Leaders in the field of HIV have called f...

Diagnostics for Respondent-driven Sampling.

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a widely used method for sampling from hard-to-reach human populations, especially populations at higher risk for HIV. Data are collected through peer-referral over social networks. RDS has proven practical for data collection in many difficult settings and is widely used. Inference from RDS data requires many strong assumptions because the sampling design is...

Respondent Driven Sampling

Respondent driven sampling (RDS) is a network sampling technique typically employed for hard-to-reach populations (e.g. drug users, men who have sex with men, people with HIV). Similar to snowball sampling, initial seed respondents recruit additional respondents from their network of friends. The recruiting process repeats iteratively, thereby forming long referral chains. Unlike in snowball sa...

Assessing respondent-driven sampling.

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a network-based technique for estimating traits in hard-to-reach populations, for example, the prevalence of HIV among drug injectors. In recent years RDS has been used in more than 120 studies in more than 20 countries and by leading public health organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States. Despite the widesp...

Respondent Driven Sampling as a Counting Process