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The snowball sampling method became crucial as a springboard to locating other potential interviewees, who could be either protest participants or nonparticipants, including concerned citizens with general opinions about the conduct of civilian politics and the quality of state governance in Jamaica. This approach usually requires the researcher to make initial contact with a small group of people who are deemed relevant to the research topic. These respondents are then used to designate other potential informants, who subsequently nominate other respondents, and so on (Bryman, 2004; Patton, 1990; Sarantakos, 1993). Because the nature of this technique is inherently subjective, its reliability and representativeness were of some concern. For instance, snowballing automatically lends itself to a certain bias, and I found that some of the respondents tended to nominate a set of interconnected people whose ideology or sociocultural and political frame of reference was complementary to theirs.3 I found this tendency to be strongest among media practitioners, who frequently nominated their colleagues and members of the intelligentsia who associated primarily with people within their own (professional and social class) rank. Fortunately, this tendency for a sampling bias became less of a problem because of my awareness of it and my requests for interviews with persons of a lower socioeconomic status. Through the agency of one political activist as well as a beat reporter with “connections” and an intricate knowledge of the inner city, I was put in touch with people who could speak eloquently about the way of life in the slums and their attitudes and perspectives regarding the causes for violent protests and citizen actions in these communities.
The snowball sampling approach also led to me engage with Jamaican entertainers whose work predominantly deals with social commentary and protest music.4 It is worth noting also that despite their enormous wealth and improved social status, many of these participants grew up among the disadvantaged underclass and have maintained very strong emotional connections with and a partiality for the concerns of poor and marginalized people. As such, I found they provided comments that were informed by an awareness of multiple perspectives. I constantly refined and adjusted my questions in order to fill in gaps in the data or