Krista Gile, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is offering a webinar on respondent-driven sampling (RDS) in September. RDS is a link-tracing network sampling method that has been used in hundreds of studies throughout the world to sample hard-to-reach human populations.

RDS is a branching-without-replacement sampling process over an unknown irregular network, where sampling decisions are made by respondents. It is widely used because it is easy to implement in many challenging populations, but inference is necessarily based on many strong assumptions.

This webinar will describe common assumptions used for inference and highlight challenges with these approaches. It will include an introduction to respondent-driven sampling, common assumptions and inferential methods for population prevalence estimation using RDS, common approaches to estimation of population size using RDS, other inferential goals, software available for inference from RDS data, and practical challenges arising in RDS.

While a date hasn’t been announced yet for the webinar, keep an eye on @srmsasa on Twitter, the SRMS Community, or the SRMS website for updates.

If you have ideas for a webinar you would like to develop or see offered, email SRMS Education Officer James Wagner.