Reminiscing about his training as an anthropology graduate student at Chicago in the late 1960s, McGilvray recounted how he arrived in a remote area of Sri Lanka only to discover that his theoretically sophisticated and fashionable thesis proposal . . . was irrelevant to the mundane realities of the local scene, that he had learned the wrong dialect of Tamil, and that he was not going to be able to select his informants. Instead they were going to select him. He wrote his ethnography relying heavily on conversations with his cook, and his postman, and with a few young unmarried men in the community who were eager to talk to him and had nothing better to do (Shweder 1996:16).
A number of sampling strategies may be warranted depending on the kind of qualitative research you are contemplating. Because of the variety of approaches to data that exist in qualitative research, there are many more potential factors to contemplate when choosing a sample. These may range from simple stratification of the sample to make sure interviewees represent the range of social statuses in a population, to recognizing the importance of interviewing what anthropologists call "key informants"-people who are discovered serendipitously and who have a particularly useful way of viewing their group. Johnson (1990), though writing about sampling in long-term ethnographic settings, discusses factors that may have wider relevance in qualitative research. He also discusses ways of discovering important things about one's sample once it is chosen. Many of the general guides to qualitative methods listed in the first section of this bibliography have discussions of how to sample for qualitative research. Miles and Huberman (1994:27-34) give brief descriptions of a very wide variety of sampling methods.
References:
Johnson, J. (1986). Social Networks and Innovation Adoption: A Look at Burt's Use of Structural Equivalence. Social Networks, 8, 343-364.
Johnson, J. C. (1990). Selecting Ethnographic Informants. (Vol. 22). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Johnson, J., & Orback, M. (1990). Fishery in Transition: The Impact of Urbanization on Florida's Spiny Lobster Fishery. City and Society, 4(1), 88-104.
Johnson, A., & Johnson, O. R. (1990). From Quality to Quantity: On the Measurement Potential of Ethnographic Fieldnotes. In R. Sanjek (Ed.), Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology (pp. 161-186). Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press.
Kempton, W., Boster, J., & Hartley, J. (1995). Environmental Values in American Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Patton, M. Q. (1980). Qualitative Evaluation Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Werner, O., & Bernard, H. R. (1994). Short Take 13: Ethnographic Sampling. Cultural Anthropology Methods Journal, 6(2), 7-9.