Innovative sampling and participant recruitment in sexuality research

Although making significant contributions to empirical and theoretical understanding of sexuality in society, qualitative research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals encounters problems in participant recruitment and sampling. Participants for research on LGBT individuals are often recruited through counseling services and snowball sampling with the result that samples tend not to be representative of the general population—a significant problem given that it is a common practice for scholars to generalize from multiple sets of qualitative research. In this essay, I draw on a research project that used innovative recruitment procedures to argue for a plurality of recruitment procedures in future research on sexualities and personal relationships.