Subject: [Air-l] Using LinkedIn for survey sample

Has anyone recruited survey participants from a social network (e.g., LinkedIn)? I'm looking at recruitment possibilites for a dissertation on organizational behavior (motivation to lead and moral philosophy). It occurred to me that LinkedIn might be a good resource for a sample of professionals, but I'm not sure of the privacy/ethical aspect. Any thoughts or experiences?

less from the privacy/ethical aspect, but more from the practical aspect... 1) does LinkedIn's terms of service (TOS) allow you to use their data in this fashion? Your IRB should probably study that document carefully as part of your project approval... 2) LinkedIn is somewhat self-selecting - in that you get a very particular set of folks, with a particular set of goals, signing up for it. 3) difficulty of accounting for bias in your sample. how're you going to explain your sampling strategy, and what defenses will you use in discussing it with people who care about that sort of thing? 4) data collection issues - how're you going to extract this data that you want, and where're you going to stick it? IIRC LinkedIn doesn't have an API as such, and so hiring a programmer to write a cool little crawler for it in an afternoon is a pretty substantial investment of time, energy, and dollars. 5) can you really get at organizational structures from the (very limited, in terms of information available at linkedin.com...) data available on the folks that you sample out? Anyway... these are the things that come to mind fairly immediately. There's research out there about sampling from incomplete networks; some of that should prove most instructive as you work out your ideas... --elijah