During the last decade, new social realities, like the social networks, urged social research methodology to reconsider many techniques in order to face the new reality. As a consequence, a new kind of survey has been developed, exploiting the Net’s power and
involving internet users: the “e-survey”. One of the main challenges of e-surveys is represented by the sampling procedure: this one needs to be reconsidered in order to avoid the risk of being biased and the lack of scientific accountability. Our work will concentrate on Facebook, one among the most famous social networks.
In the first part, the paper provides a review of the major available sampling techniques, by highlighting and underlining their strengths and weaknesses, especially in Facebook perspective. Afterwards, the paper illustrates some proposal of Facebook sampling techniques.
First of all, Facebook sampling techniques can be divided into two groups:
1) techniques aimed at sampling the whole Facebook population
2) techniques aimed at sampling known groups (Facebook subpopulation).
In our opinion, one of the most problematic issues on Facebook surveys concerns the contact strategy that should be adopted in order to maximize the response rate. In particular, the difficulty arises in the first contact strategy: different strategies can be identified. The respondent can be contacted through:
- an individual researcher’s profile, created ad - hoc;
- an impersonal profile regarding the Research Institute or the survey title.
Despite all, we would like to do a very important remark. We can use a Facebook sampling method when the respondent population and the target Facebook population are quite the same.