Identification of homophily and preferential recruitment in respondent-driven sampling

Abstract: Respondent-driven sampling (RDS) is a link-tracing procedure for surveying hidden or hard-to-reach populations in which subjects recruit other subjects via their social network. There is significant research interest in detecting clustering or dependence of epidemiological traits in networks, but researchers disagree about whether data from RDS studies can reveal it. Two distinct mechanisms account for dependence in traits of recruiters and recruitees in an RDS study: homophily, the tendency for individuals to share social ties with others exhibiting similar characteristics, and preferential recruitment, in which recruiters do not recruit uniformly at random from their available alters. The different effects of network homophily and preferential recruitment in RDS studies have been a source of confusion in methodological research on RDS, and in empirical studies of the social context of health risk in hidden populations. In this paper, we give rigorous definitions of homophily and preferential recruitment and show that neither can be measured precisely in general RDS studies. We derive nonparametric identification regions for homophily and preferential recruitment and show that these parameters are not point identified unless the network takes a degenerate form. The results indicate that claims of homophily or recruitment bias measured from empirical RDS studies may not be credible. We apply our identification results to a study involving both a network census and RDS on a population of injection drug users in Hartford, CT.