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A COMPARISON OF UNION CONSCIOUSNESS IN CENTRALIZED AND
PARTICIPATORY UNIONS
E. Paul Durrenberger
Department of Anthropology
Penn State
THE PROBLEM
I propose to test the consequences of centralized vs. de-centralized organization in
union locals that represent healthcare workers. I hypothesize, on the basis of
ethnographic findings in fisheries, that union consciousness will be more developed
among union members in the more de-centralized organization than the more centralized
ones. I propose to test this by comparison of triads tests among worksites of the locals. I
have completed the analyses for the more centralized locals and propose to collect and
analyze comparable data for the less centralized one and to do the comparison between
the two.
CONTRIBUTIONS
The theoretical contributions will include detailed explorations of the
relationships between the organization of power and the organization of cognitive
structures, the relationship between organizational structures and patterns of thought.
The practical contributions will be in assessing the differences between centralized and
participatory organization. The methodological contributions will include further
development of recently developed instruments of measurement and their relationships to
ethnography.
RATIONALE
Theoretical and methodological
Eric Wolf (1999) explored the ways cultural configurations articulate with power
to arrange the settings and domains of social and economic life, especially the allocation
and use of labor. He wanted to understand and analyze the ways relations that organize
economic and political interactions shape ideation to make the world intelligible. He
develops three examples but never actually shows how power, ideology, allocation of
labor, and production are related beyond a few rather vague suggestions about tribute and
class structure. He says that the "specification of ideologies in cultural terms can only be
a part of our task. We must also know how these cultural forms engage with the material
resources and organizational arrangements of the world they try to affect or transform."
Because this work does not carry out this laudable program, in spite of the talk of
dynamics in the abstract, each case seems rather static. Wolf did not show the inter
workings of ideology, organization of labor, and disposition of products in the three
examples so the complex dynamic that Wolf articulates remains an abstract if credible
argument. Jean Lave's practice theory (e.g. 1988) goes a good way beyond Wolf's
conclusions and offers more theoretical treatment than he does. Wolf poses significant
questions, Lave provides a theoretical means of answering them, and Romney and others
provide the means.
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Meanwhile, Moore, Romney, and Hsia (1999) and Romney and others (2000)
developed a means to explore and characterize and quantify similarities and differences
in shared patterns of thought. They illustrate their method by examining terms for
emotion in Chinese, English and Japanese. Culture, they argue, resides in the minds of
people as pictures that are cognitive representations of semantic domains. A semantic
domain is an organized set of words at the same level of contrast that refer to a single
conceptual sphere. Using judgments of similarity, they use scaling and visualization
procedures to make precise comparisons among what is in the minds of different
individuals and they can measure the extent to which these pictures correspond or differ.
Ethnographic
Ethnographic studies of fisheries have shown that centralized management
systems are too fragile and inattentive to changes to be responsive and adaptive while
fishers find those that allow for participation to be more legitimate and are more likely to
implement their policies and thus achieve management goals (Jentoft 1989, see
Durrenberger and King 2000 for extensive citations).
Ethnographic studies of Unions in Chicago have shown that members share no
conceptual model of their union but different ones depending on the realities of power
and organization at their various worksites or at the same worksites at different times
(Durrenberger 1997, Durrenberger and Erem 1999a). The union locals were centralized
in their organization (Durrenberger and Erem 1999b, Erem and Durrenberger 2000). Not
all unions or all locals are as centralized. One that provides for more member
participation is in Pennsylvania. Both Chicago and Pennsylvania locals organize
healthcare workers in similar types of workplaces—public and private hospitals,
rehabilitation hospitals, and residential care facilities (see Breda 1997 for citations,
literature and ethnography of organized nurses; Foner 1993.1994, 1995 for nursing home
aids).
RESEARCH SITES
The ethnography of fisheries management indicates the importance the degree of
constituent participation in or centralization of decision making. I hypothesize that the
centralized organization of the Chicago locals made them less responsive to member
concerns at worksites, so members responded to worksite conditions rather than to the
union. Thus different worksite arrangements are associated with different models of the
union. The fisheries work suggests that members would respond more to participatory
organization by identifying more with their union rather than with conditions at their
worksites. Therefore in a less centralized local, I expect there to be more agreement of
members at different worksites, less variation among worksites, and higher union
consciousness. I can measure this by the same triads tests I developed in the Chicago
studies.
While I was working in Chicago, I heard from many in Service Employees
International Union (SEIU) that 1199/P in Pennsylvania was less hierarchic in its
organization than other locals. In January of 2000 1199/P instituted a series of reforms
that a study suggested. That study indicated that while 80% of their members believed
that what happened in the union affected them personally, fully 59% of them were not
involved or only marginally involved in the activities of the union. Many locals would
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have taken this as a measure of success rather than a sign of a need for change. After
membership meetings, the members voted on a number of changes in the bylaws of the
local that even further decentralize power and authority.
Similar studies were conducted among locals in Chicago, but the findings were
reported only to presidents who shared them sparingly with other officers. Never were
they presented to or discussed by membership (Erem and Durrenberger 2000). Through a
series of organizational moves that began in the mid 90’s the structure of Chicago locals
has been even more centralized in recent years.
Thus, the Chicago locals and 1199/P contrast on the dimension of the degree of
centralization and member participation and make an ideal comparison for this study. In
the Chicago locals, triads tests show that members’ understandings of their union varied
according to the structural realities of the worksite.
TRIADS
Workers at a jobsite who are organized into a bargaining unit of a union local
elect co-workers to enforce the provisions of the contract, convey worker concerns to
management, help bargain new contracts, resolve worksite problems, and if they cannot
be easily resolved by talking with supervisors, to represent the worker at a second step
grievance hearing with the supervisor. If this fails to untangle the difficulty, the steward
may call a union representative who the local hires to represent members at a number of
worksites. The union rep, as they are called, can represent the member at a third step
hearing with the department manager and the company's vice-president of human
resources. If the grievance is not resolved at the third step hearing, and if both sides
agree, it can be submitted to the judgment of an arbitrator whose decision is binding.
Thus law and practice have established a set of roles for dealing with workplace
problems through union mechanisms. Union members do not establish the roles of
steward, rep, supervisor, manager, co-worker, but conduct their work lives in terms of
them and construct various representations of these categories.
Malinowski (1922) differentiated between internal views of the people he was
trying to understand as “ethnographic” in distinction to external constructions which he
called “sociological.” Marvin Harris’s (1999) distinction between the emic and the etic
captures another difference that Sandstrom and Sandstrom (1995) discuss at some length.
The people we are trying to understand build emic statements from discriminations they
make. Such statements are wrong if they contradict participants’ sense of similarity,
difference, significance, meaningfulness or appropriateness. Etic statements depend on
distinctions upon which a scientific community agree. They are wrong if empirical
evidence fails to support them (Harris 1999). In this example, the law and practice
determine the external, or “sociological” perspective on union-management relations and
we can ascertain internal or emic views as Malinowski did, by ethnography, though
neither is in Harris’s terms etic.
The externally defined categories, independent of union members constructions,
experiences, views, or opinions classify members, stewards, and reps as the “union side”
as versus supervisors and managers on the “company” side. Stewards are on the same
level of management as supervisors while reps are equal to managers and vice presidents.
Because union members develop their own conceptual schemes or folk models
(Durrenberger 1996) concerning these relationships I wanted to determine to what extent
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members agreed with this external view, with each other and with members at other
worksites. In Chicago they did not.
One important dimension of culture is the shared aspects of mental pictures
people create of related sets of words. People’s judgments of similarities among an
organized set of words or a semantic domain is an ethnographic means to construct
individual mental pictures and measure their similarities to others’ (Romney et al 1996).
As Romney and Moore (1998: 315) put it, “the meaning of each term is defined by its
location relative to all the other terms.” This requires some way to measure peoples’
ideas of similarity among the items of an organized set of words. A triads test does this
by asking informants to indicate which of three items is least like the other two for all
possible combinations of three items in the set of words. In selecting one item as least
similar, informants indicate that the remaining two are somehow similar.
I arranged the terms “steward,” “rep,” “manager,” “supervisor,” “worker in the
same department (or line),” and “worker in a different department (or line)” in all
possible combinations of three on a page and asked each respondent to indicate the item
in each line that was most different from the other two. Weller and Romney (1988) and
Bernard (1988) discuss this procedure and its history in anthropology. For more recent
discussions of the triads multidimensional scaling representations, and further citations to
the methodological and substantive literature on the topics see Romney et al 1996, 1999,
2000, Romney, Moore, and Rush 1996; and Romney and Moore 1998.
If union members consistently used only single criteria to judge similarity, there
would be three “pure” models or different mental pictures based on three different
criteria. As an example, consider the triad: "supervisor, co-worker, union rep.” If a
person selected “supervisor” as the most different, indicating similarity between workers
and reps, it would imply a "union model." They are distinguishing in terms of union
versus non-union affiliation. The choice of "coworker" would indicate a conceptual
scheme based on hierarchy as "co-workers" are less powerful than supervisors and reps.
Picking "rep" would indicate a workplace proximity scheme as that is the feature that
supervisors and co-workers share. Ethnographic observation and interviews might
indicate other criteria of classification such as e.g. gender (if all co workers are women
and supervisors men) race or ethnicity (if workers tend to be of one category and
management another), or age.
Tabulation of responses in a matrix of all possible relationships among items
determines the similarity, “closeness,” or proximity of any two items. Every time a
respondent does not select two items in single row of 3, every time a respondent selects
the other item, the cell for the unselected pair in the matrix increases one point for
similarity. Each row of each respondent’s responses thus adds one point to some pair. In
this design, since all pairs occur 4 times, the maximum score for any pair is 4, indicating
the greatest degree of similarity between the two items. The summation of individual
matrices into an aggregate matrix shows the strength of similarity for the population.
Then the counts are converted into percentages to develop a measure of proximity from 0
to 1.
It is not meaningful simply to sum responses unless there is some reason to
suppose that the picture is somehow cultural, a representation that people of the group
share (Romney 1999). As an example, consider the external legal model. If there were
perfect consensus, all respondents would agree and always select the item that indicates
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that they are thinking in terms of union relationships. They would select “manager” or
“supervisor” as most different whenever they occur in triads with “steward,” “rep” and/or
“co-worker.” Thus, manager-supervisor would score 100% and supervisor-steward,
supervisor-rep, supervisor-same or different line worker would score 0. Likewise for
Manager in all of these pairs. Steward-rep would be 100% and different line workersame line worker would be 100%. Worker-steward and worker-rep cells would be 50%
or .5 because in those 2 (of 4) triads where workers, stewards, and reps all occur, union
membership does not distinguish among the items. Thus the highest score could be .5 in
the steward-worker cells and the rep-worker cells.
I used Anthropac (Borgatti 1996) to make and score the triads tests. I then used
Anthropac to test the individual proximity matrices for consensus. The aggregate
matrices for each worksite indicate the strength of similarity between each pair of items.
I used these aggregate proximity matrices in two further ways. First, I correlated them to
one another to determine the similarity between any two groups. For this, I eliminated
the relationships which were universally deemed to be similar--manager-supervisor,
worker-worker, and steward-rep--roughly, management with itself; members with
themselves, and union officers with themselves. Eliminating these reduces the
correlations from the full matrix of relationships and highlights differences rather than
similarities that are artifacts of the instrument. Groups with highly correlated matrices
share ideas about the similarity of roles while those that are not correlated do not.
Second, I used Anthropac’s multi dimensional scaling program to develop a visual
representation of the “distances” among the items. Those items that are similar cluster
together; those that are not are dispersed in the diagram thus allowing a visual
representation of similarities and differences that the aggregate proximity matrices
measure.
To further test the reliability of this method, I administered the triads test to the
staff of a different local in the same international union in Chicago (n=25) and their
similarity matrix is highly correlated to the one for the staff of the local in question as
well as the “perfect” model. Because this shows a high degree of awareness of union-non
union distinctions as opposed to alternative ways of organizing the same relationships
(hierarchy or workplace or other) I suggested that this model indicates “union
consciousness,” the emic use of union-non-union distinctions for ordering terms for the
relevant workplace relationships.
Having a way of characterizing the mental picture, internal scheme, or folk model
of union-management relations at different worksites not only allowed me to compare
these constructs at different places, but also allowed me to develop hypotheses about how
the internal models are related to other variables such level of activism in the union. I
expected that more activist stewards would have a model of social relations more similar
to the staff or the “outside” or “prefect” union model—to be more conscious of the union
as an organizing principle and show it in their triads tests. A similar triads test
administered to the stewards of the local gathered at their annual convention in 1996
indicated that there was no relationship between union activism and union consciousness-whether or not stewards thought in terms of the “perfect model,” one of the alternatives
(hierarchy or workplace) or some mixture of the three (Durrenberger 1997).
There was a relationship between union consciousness and the place of the union
in the organization of worksites—a dimension of structure rather than thought or
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cognition. Because the aggregate similarity matrix for the triads tests of the union local’s
staff was very close to the external model I used it as the measure of union
consciousness. To the extent that a group of members showed a similar cognitive pattern,
I concluded that they exhibited union consciousness. Members at only two worksites
exhibited union consciousness. One was a public hospital (Pearsons r=.89) where for
various reasons the union is very strong and significant (Durrenberger 1997). The other
was a rehabilitation hospital (r=.64). I concluded that this was because of the small size
of the membership and the strength of the chief steward who had been in office for
several decades and cultivated a vast network of relationships of mutual obligation
among members as well as management. Furthermore, just before I administered the first
triads tests, there had been a union victory which all of the members had celebrated.
Other hospitals had neither the extensive union structure of the public one nor the
history of recent victories or intricate networks of relations that connected the leadership
of the unit of the rehabilitation hospital. I concluded (Durrenberger 1997) that union
consciousness seemed to be related to features of structure—realities of power and
organization--and perhaps history or recent events.
However, when the chief steward at the rehabilitation hospital retired just before
the unit negotiated a new contract, I was presented with the possibility of a quasiexperimental design. I administered the same triads test again in 1998, after a
significant structural change, to detect whether the patterns of thought had changed with
the change of structure.
The union structure remained in tact with stewards, reps, existing collective
bargaining arrangements and law throughout this change of personnel , there were
changes of relations of power as workplace networks changed. As this steward withdrew
from the workplace, her well developed relationships of mutual obligation with
management and workers alike disappeared. This shift brought together what Alford
(1998) calls multivariate, historical, and ethnographic approaches to bear on a single
theoretical question which is at the same time a practical issue—the relationship between
consciousness or patterns of thought and changing realities of power and organization—
structure--at a single worksite. The same triads test administered just after the ratification
of the new contract shows a cognitive pattern quite different from the first one more than
a year before (r=-.41). The earlier pattern was similar to the staff pattern (r=.64), but the
second was not (r=-.47).
When people saw union stewards as powerful and effective, they stressed union
membership and the power of union officers compared with management personnel—they were
conscious of their union as efficacious. A little over a year later, following the loss of all the
seasoned stewards and their networks of mutual obligation with management, a source of power
and influence, after a series of ineffective interventions to meet management imprecations, the
same triads test showed that workers saw themselves closer to a more powerful management.
The multi-dimensional scaling representations of the two showed a shift away
from a model based on union membership and the workers at the rehabilitation hospital
were no longer seeing themselves primarily as union members, but as workers for the
management. They no longer held union officers to be more powerful than management
(Durrenberger and Erem 1999).
The triads test was administered at the same time as an overwhelmingly positive
vote to ratify the contract, tantamount to a survey of satisfaction with the new contract.
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The ratification vote was strong, so the shift in the triads cannot indicate alienation
because of the new contract. The shift must be related to the change in the structure of
the unit occasioned by the withdrawal of all of the experienced stewards and the chief
steward and the disappearance of those networks of relationships from the unit. The
cognitive mode reflected the changing realities of power and organization—structure--in
the worksite. The fact that the cognitive model changes to mark reorganization of the
structure leads to the conclusion that structure causes cognition, not the other way
around.
The triads tests provide the ethnographic data upon which we can base statements about
the relationships between patterns of thought and relationships of power and organization—
structure. While culture is more than the dimensions of contrast among sets of words as critiques
of language-centered approaches have shown, such semantic domains are important dimensions
of culture. Furthermore, they are quantifiable aspects of culture that are amenable to empirical
ethnography so we can ask just how similar two cognitive schemes are or how similar two items
are within a single scheme (Romney, 1999:113).
CENTRALIZATION/DECENTRALIZATION
Rappaport (1971) argued that technological development disrupts the cybernetics
of adaptation by altering the relationship between sanctity and authority. In stratified
societies, authority is uncoupled from any quality of unquestionable truthfulness that
people impute to unverifiable propositions—sanctity--and from the actions they imply,
actions that adjust the system to its changing environment. He contrasts societies in
which sacred conventions adjust to changes in the absence of authorities with those in
which authorities have great power but little sanctity. To put this in other terms, in
egalitarian societies many equivalent messages converge to adjust to changes while in
centralized states a single voice or a few voices dominate. Adaptation in egalitarian
societies is slow but sure and while adjustments in centralized states may come quickly,
they are liable to error.
In egalitarian systems, unequal distribution of benefits are errors, easily corrected
by direct information exchange between reciprocating independent individuals. Instead
of concentrating on the coercive or power dimension of social orders, one can focus on
the exchange of information and the means for identifying and correcting inappropriate or
bad decisions or actions, errors. In more complex orders, independence of subordinates
is traded for effective and efficient information handling and decision making. Decision
making becomes specialized and some people make decisions about lower order
decisions instead of about production or distribution. A third level of information
processing corrects and coordinates lower level decisions. In certain conditions of
material plenty, complex exchange, and conflict such systems are advantageous, but they
become self perpetuating and "error" is not necessarily associated with inequitable
distribution of benefits (Wright and Johnson 1975, Rappaport 1994).
The decisions result in policies that define differential access to resources and
divergent interests. Thus, members of different classes continually contest their access
rights and endeavor to improve them by whatever means are available. This contention
makes states dynamic, always re-adjusting rights of one group to those of others.
Structural relationships define the practice that is associated with cognitive
systems or folk models. Structural relationships are largely determined by the policies of
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states and people contest those policies depending on their interests and access to
resources the policies define.
Thu and I argued (1997) that the multiplicity of interests makes adaptation an
inappropriate concept for understanding states. Force is rarely exercised because it is
expensive and alienating (Nader 1997). And we assumed that the ruled are no less clever
than the ruling. We argued that we can understand such processes as the industrialization
of swine production and its discontents by considering states as information processing
systems (Flannery 1972, Johnson 1978, Johnson 1982, Kus 1981, Reynolds 1984, van der
Leeuw 1981, Wright 1986) and tracing the role of cultural signals to pinpoint the loci of
their impact on policy.
For comparing forms of organization such as union locals, we can follow the
same process of tracing signals through the system—where do they originate, by what
means to they travel, how are they amplified and damped, and how do they contribute to
decision making. In centralized systems, signals flow to the center where a single figure
or coalition collates them to make decisions. In a participatory model, signals flow to
many places and many constituents contribute to decision making. There are means of
measuring these differences, but that is not the central objective of this project.
The hypothesis I propose to test is that participatory organization of union locals
is associated with a higher degree of union consciousness than centralized organization.
Adaptability and long term system viability is likely to be local. The findings
from maritime anthropology (see Durrenberger and King 2000) translate into a concern
for policies that allow for and foster realistic management, close to the people and
systems they are designed to regulate, policies that allow for constant local monitoring,
change, and adaptation, and policies that guarantee sufficient local commitment that they
are self-policing. This is the difference between centralized and participatory
organization that we can detect between the Chicago locals and the Pennsylvania ones.
PRACTICAL IMPORTANCE
From advertising to education there are modern institutional structures dedicated
to the proposition that the way to change people's actions is to change their minds, a
proposal that rests on the assumption that thought determines action. When Jean Lave
(1988), attempting to understand how people learn and use that most cerebral of cognitive
skills--mathematics--challenged transference theory, the notion that we can isolate
abstract properties of systems and communicate them to others via symbols, she
advocated expanding our understanding of cognition from something that happens in the
mind to a process that stretches over the environment as well as time into past
experiences and future expectations. In doing so she offered a new definition to a
movement Ortner (1984) detected in the attempts to synthesize and sort out
anthropological theorizing since the 1960's, a trend she tentatively called practice theory.
In his interview with a corporate culture guru—someone with a definite stake in
the idea that he can teach people out of whatever troubles corporations are in—Newfield
(1998) concluded that the problems are structural and systemic and beyond the reach of
employee empowerment attitudes. He found that practice is more important than
concept. The human relations revolution never happened because one cannot persuade
people who have gotten ahead by deferring to rather than challenging superiors to flatten
an organization. The power comes from above and the ones in the middle are its
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instruments. Knowing this, they are incapable of changing the structure. Programs of
“participatory management” such as quality circles and team structures may be less
participatory than means of creating a compliant work force (Lamphere and Zavella
1997).
This is as much an issue for unions as it is for corporations since the new
leadership of the AFL-CIO has initiated a massive organizing campaign (Bronfenbrenner
et al 1998). But local unions may become victims of their own successes. When union
members at a worksite are dissatisfied with the service they receive, they can vote to oust
or de-certify the union. Units with more participatory organization tend to win and those
with more centralized organization tend to lose. A study of national level statistical data
showed that decertifications were not rooted in worker dissatisfaction with pay, benefits
or conditions or with employer challenges. Those units that had at least one steward per
thirty voters, conducted new employee orientations, held regular membership meetings,
published newsletters, publicized grievance victories and losses, and trained stewards to
organize around grievances fared better than others. Win rates were higher in units with
active rank-and-file bargaining committees. Those units that tended to lose were ones in
which stewards were appointed rather than elected, where few grievances were filed,
where most grievances were related to discipline and discharge, and where the rep never
visited the workplace (Juravich and Bronfenbrenner 1998).
Nationally, SEIU is aggressive in its organizing drives but it also has the highest
rate of decertification. This indicates that in spite of success at organizing, SEIU has not
been successful in maintaining the members they already represent. Centralized
organization of some of the locals works against this goal by not providing flexible and
adaptive local services to members. It was for this reason that decertification was an
ever-present threat in the Chicago locals where I did ethnographic work. This study can
contribute to an understanding of how unions keep the units they organize.
Lave suggests that knowledge and practice are inseparable. This conclusion
follows from her finding that it is impossible to abstract analytical knowledge from
practice and transfer it directly to others. If patterns of thought are situational,
determined by changing social structures, then it is not effective to try to change social
patterns by changing minds. Education, in the sense of transference of patterns, is not the
answer. The way to change minds, if that is an objective, is to change the practical
realities, the organizational structures, that configure peoples lives and actions.
PROCEDURES
One of the objectives of this research it to discover to what extent 1199/P is a
significant unit to its members. It is not appropriate to assume that it is. Worksites are
significant units. Thus, this project will be organized around worksites as units. I will
match the Pennsylvania worksites as closely as possible to the Chicago ones, and if time
allows, expand it to others.
The time periods in this list assume one assistant working half-time. All of these
times are estimated on the basis of past experience with the study of union locals in
Chicago, but allowing for additional travel time as the worksites of 1199/P are located
across the state of Pennsylvania and not as concentrated as the ones in Chicago. This
schedule allows time for consulting with members, stewards, reps, and officers of the
union about the findings and time to prepare written materials for presentation to the
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local. While I do not conceive of this study as an exercise in applied anthropology, I do
think it appropriate to make the findings available to the local so that they may be useful.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Study of 1199/P historical records, procedures, and documents. 3
months.
Ethnographic observation of union meetings, training sessions, and
decision processes—4 months.
Ethnographic observation of stewards and reps at work negotiating
contracts, handling grievances—3 months
Ethnographic interviews with members, stewards, reps and officers—4
months
Design and administration of survey instruments that derive from steps
1-3—2 months.
Administration of triads test from the Chicago studies to members from
at least 9 different worksites—2 months
Coding and entering of data—1 month
Analysis, conclusions, and preliminary writing—2 months
Discussion of results with 1199/P members, stewards,reps, and
officers. 1 month.
Analysis and writing of results for 1199/P—2 months
Sampling
In doing any of the survey work, I shall discuss with the officers and staff of the
local which worksites would be most appropriate to sample. Phases 1-4 of this study will
provide sufficient ethnographic information to make independent informed judgments
about these suggestions. I will endeavor to draw a random sample of members from each
selected worksite using membership lists as sampling frames. My attempts to employ
such procedures in Chicago resulted in total failure because the membership lists were
inaccurate and I had to operate under severe time limitations. One of the reforms of
1199/P is to maintain up to date charts—membership lists—for all worksites. This is
important to a decentralized organization because it must be able to reach all members
rather than just a few key figures. If the organization does have such records that I can
use for sampling frames, and there is sufficient time, I shall do my best to insure random
sampling. If this is not possible, then my alternative would be to do what I did in the
Chicago studies and use informed opportunistic sampling. By informed, I mean that if
about 25% of the members are in the dietary department to have about 25% of the
respondents in the sample from the dietary department. Though this is not random
sampling, it is more representative than strictly opportunistic or snowball sampling.
Snowball sampling is the least desirable as it introduces the most bias by taping only
certain networks and ignoring all others. Opportunistic sampling can introduce a number
of other biases.