by Tran Nguyen - Saturday, 24 December 2016, 10:56 PM
It’s called snowball sampling because (in theory) once you have the ball rolling, it picks up more “snow” along the way and becomes larger and larger. Snowball sampling is a non-probability sampling method. It doesn’t have the probability involved, with say, simple random sampling (where the odds are the same for any particular participant being chosen). Rather, the researchers used their own judgment to choose participants.
