ABSTRACT
Snowball sampling usually ends when one of three conditions are met: all leads have been exhausted, the pattern of findings suggests replication of information from respondents that is, additional participants are providing similar information to earlier participants, or a predetermined number of participants has been obtained or some combination of these conditions occurs. A feature of cross-sex secret, forbidden sexual relationships is that they are typically constructed between status unequals. One status imbalance usually exists: age, class, or marital status. Liaisons between single women and married men should provide the paradigmatic case for these secret, forbidden, power-imbalanced relationships, not only because of their numerical abundance, but for cultural-historical, interactional, and structural reasons. The frequently reinstituted “snowball” sampling procedure generated an extensive list of potential interviewees from a wide variety of social networks. The women’s accounts make sense within the growing substantive and theoretical understanding of women’s experiences, considerable face validity can be claimed for the study.
