Sampling and recruitment

We used Australia as our case study. We conducted purposive sampling to recruit participants with a range of experiences in the practice, spread and receipt of new scientific knowledge relating to health. Since we aimed to hear a wide range of experiences and views regarding dissemination of scientific information, we sought participant diversity in expertise, experience and roles. We sampled from early/mid-career researchers and more experienced academics working in science research or meta-research (studying issues of health research quality and integrity). We also sampled from science communicators working in academic publishing, university media offices or lay media outlets; and members of the lay community. This paper reports on the subsection of interview data from participants who were professionally involved in science knowledge production and communication.

We identified potential participants for interview through: existing professional and lay contacts; following up suggestions from previous participants (purposive snowball sampling⁴⁸), searching for people currently publishing in the public domain about scientific misinformation in the field of COVID-19 pandemic. We contacted potential participants through our professional email networks and individual contacts, and through contact details in the public domain.

This was planned as an exploratory study. We were constrained by time, resources and the incentive to complete our research in a timely fashion in order to contribute useful information that might improve the process of science communication during the current pandemic crisis. We did not aim for data saturation, rather we aimed to recruit at least two participants from each of the major subgroups of: science researcher, meta-researcher, science communicator and lay community. In this way, we hoped to collect a broad range of information about the views and experiences of science professionals on the topic of misinformation in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.