Question

All the following statements are true about snowball sampling except:

• A. Snowball sampling can result in samples that are very large or spread over large geographic areas, thus increasing the time and cost of data collection.
• B. A major objective of snowball sampling is to estimate characteristics that are rare in the population.
• C. The major advantage of snowball sampling is that it substantially increases the likelihood of locating the desired characteristics in the population.
• D. Snowball sampling results in relatively low sampling variance and costs.

Hint:

Snowball helps find rare cases, but don’t expect known sampling errors, low variance, or uniformly low costs.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is D

Step 1: Re-state what snowball does well.
It is designed to locate rare/hidden populations efficiently by asking respondents to recruit peers (chain referral). This does increase the likelihood of finding the target traits ⇒ (c) is true.
A key use-case is estimating features of rare groups ⇒ (b) is true.
Step 2: Practical consequences.
Chains can grow large and geographically dispersed, raising fieldwork complexity, time, and cost—especially as waves expand ⇒ (a) is true.
Step 3: Why (d) is the exception (false).
Snowball is a nonprobability method with unknown selection probabilities; “sampling variance” in the probability-sampling sense is not well-defined, and realized variability can be high due to homophily/clustered networks. Costs are not necessarily “relatively low”; they may increase with recruitment waves and travel/logistics. Hence (d) is false.
\[ \boxed{(d)} \]