Adaptive sampling: recruiting a diverse community sample of survivors of sexual violence.

Accessing vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations is a significant challenge for nurse researchers. Adaptive sampling is a procedure that has been used effectively in community-based research to recruit rare or hidden populations. Structured community assessment, as practiced by community health nurses, can be used to enhance adaptive sampling procedures to recruit research participants. This article(1) describes adaptive sampling techniques, discusses how the techniques can be enhanced with a structured nursing community assessment, and describes how adaptive sampling was used successfully by nurse researchers to obtain a diverse and vulnerable community sample for a grounded-theory study of women's and men's responses to sexual violence.