RDS - a Stata program for respondent-driven sampling

Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a sampling technique typically employed for hard-to-reach populations (for example, homeless people, people with AIDS, immigrants). Briefly, initial seed respondents recruit additional respondents from their network of friends. The recruiting process repeats iteratively, thereby forming long referral chains. It is crucial to obtain estimates of respondents’ network sizes (for example, the number of friends with the characteristic of interest). RDS shares some similarities with snowball sampling, but the theoretical foundation for inference using RDS samples is much stronger. We will give a brief overview of this technique and introduce a new user-written Stata command for RDS.