Hi there

I have found this forum great but am only writing my first comment now, despite being in my third year of the PhD and viewing the forum for afar until now!

I am carrying out an online experiment and require investors to participate (I want to avoid using student surrogates, as are often used in my area of research). I used to work in investment banking and so have lots of contacts. I don't see why it would be an issue to contact the people I know in the area and ask them to complete my experiment and send it on to their colleagues etc. and my supervisors don't either, but they don't have a lot of experience in online experiments. So just wondering - is that normal practice?? And is that recruitment procedure easily defendable?!

Would love your thoughts!

Thanks!

KC

Hi KC. I guess the main problems here is sample bias and volunteer bias; by sampling from a specific group who are likely to be compliant you may get different repsonses than those from the general population, thus it is less easy to justify generalising your findings to the general population or to a investor population. Also, if you rely on your friends for future research, there is a possibility of participant fatigue (or even worse, your friends stop calling you!)

Think of the population that you want to generalise to (e.g. investors) and then try to sample from them (e.g.

, but get the appropriate permissions from the website and your ethics committee first).

Thanks!

That is a great help! I was probably a bit unclear in my post - I am using about 5/6 contacts to gain access to 3 stockbrokers and the CFA society in my country, so that they can then email those institutions themselves with my survey details and ask for investors to participate. I am looking for about 100 investors so I am more using my contacts to gain access to the larger more representative pools of investors, who can then opt in and opt out as they choose. I am hoping that overcomes the selection bias in someway. Prior research in my area uses students mostly but I am hoping given I am using actual investors, the difficulties of actually gaining access to investors and hence my use of contacts for access is overcome by the value of not using student surrogates ... that is my hope anyway!!!!!

Thank you for your response - it clears it up for me!!