Methods

I used snowball sampling to select potential participants in the study: after assembling a list of organizers known to myself and my colleagues at Pax Fauna, I asked each participant to recommend others who would be appropriate for the study. I sent a single invitation to join the study to most of the activists who were referred. Invitations were sent via email, Signal, Whatsapp, Instagram, and Facebook. Sometimes I wrote “cold messages” over social media and occasionally I was connected by another study participant.

Data saturation was the metric used to decide when the study was over: when the vast majority of ideas communicated in each new interview had also been discussed in previous interviews, that would signal I was nearing the end of data collection. Data saturation is used as an alternative to representative sampling for small-sample qualitative studies. While coding interviews, specific ideas relevant to the research question were identified through tags. Data saturation was identified when the creation of new tags slowed or stopped for several interviews in a row. At that point, I completed the interviews that were already scheduled and sent a final set of invitations to several people whose experiences were less represented by participants already included- people who had served time in prison or who represented geographies not yet included.

Out of the 38 organizers I interviewed, 11 were initial seed participants who weren’t referred by another participant but instead were on a list built by Pax Fauna’s team and advisors. Only 9 were people whom I didn’t know personally before the study began. In contrast, 36 people were invited to participate in the study but did not schedule an interview, 23 of whom were people previously unknown to me. The difficulty in recruiting study participants outside of my personal network certainly represents a limitation of this sampling method. With that limitation in mind, my findings should be understood as descriptive of a particular piece of the grassroots movement in the US and not exhaustive of advocates’ experiences. Future research of this kind should consider offering an incentive to study participants to avoid over-relying on the researchers’ personal connections, making greater use of introductions by referring participants, and sending follow-up invitations to participants who have yet to respond.