Application and Practice of Respondent - Driven Sampling Method in Survey of Retired Athletes.

The representativeness of survey sample is of great significance to the popularization of research conclusion. How to find a new method to make the sampling results closer to the overall sampling probability is one of the important problems to be solved in the study of Chinese retired athletes. The respondent -- driven sampling ( RDS) provides a new solution for the sampling of unknown retired athletes. This paper first introduces the basic principle, application procedures, characteristics and cautions of RDS, and then makes a sample survey of 316 retired athletes in China by using this method. The results show that the overall recruitment is good. After the balance analysis test, the samples collected by RDS have good typicality and representiveness, which can be used for estimation of retired athletes as a whole in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]