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%T River Sampling - a Fishing Expedition: A Non-Probability Case Study %A Murray-Watters, Alexander %A Zins, Stefan %A Silber, Henning %A Gummer, Tobias %A Lechner, Clemens %J Methods, data, analyses : a journal for quantitative methods and survey methodology (mda) %N 1 %P 3-27 %V 17 %D 2023 %K River Sample; Non-probability Sample; BIG-5; Non-linear Dimension reduction; Web Survey Research %@ 2190-4936 %~ GESIS %X The ease with which large amounts of data can be collected via the Internet has led to a renewed interest in the use of non-probability samples. To that end, this paper performs a case study, comparing two non-probability datasets - one based on a river-sampling approach, one drawn from an online-access panel - to a reference probability sample. Of particular interest is the single-question river-sampling approach, as the data collected for this study presents an attempt to field a multi-item scale with such a sampling method. Each dataset consists of the same psychometric measures for two of the Big-5 personality traits, which are expected to perform independently of sample composition. To assess the similarity of the three datasets we compare their correlation matrices, apply linear and non-linear dimension reduction techniques, and analyze the distance between the datasets. Our results show that there are important limitations when implementing a multi-item scale via a single-question river sample. We find that, while the correlation between our data sets is similar, the samples are composed of persons with different personality traits. %C DEU %G en %9 Zeitschriftenartikel %W GESIS - http://www.gesis.org %~ SSOAR - http://www.ssoar.info