Sampling Social Movement Organizations*
Scholars of nonprofits, interest groups, civic associations, and social movement organizations employ samples of organizations derived from directories or other available listings. In most cases, we are unable to evaluate the representativeness of these samples. Using data on the population of environmental organizations in North Carolina, we assess the methodological strengths and weaknesses of widely used strategies. We find that reliance on any single source yields bias on theoretically important characteristics of organizations. We show that scholars can reduce bias significantly by combining sources, creating what we call a “peak list” compiled from different types of sources. Compared to any single source, our peak list differed less from the population on the thirty-one organizational characteristics including geographical coverage, issues, discursive frames, targets, and organizational demographics such as age, organizational form, and resources. From these analyses, we offer methodological recommendations for making better-informed decisions for constructing representative organizational samples.
Contributor Notes
* This research was supported by grants from the Research/Creative Activity Grants Committee of the East Carolina University Faculty Senate, the American Sociological Association Fund for the Advancement of the Discipline (FAD), and the Milton Fund at Harvard University. We benefited from comments by Lyndi Hewitt.
† Kenneth T. Andrews is a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Bob Edwards is a Professor of Sociology at East Carolina University. Akram Al-Turk is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Anne Kristen Hunter is an Instructor at University of West Georgia.