SAMPLING METHODS

In selecting my interview respondents from Russia and Eastern Germany, I attempted to reach a wide variety of people in both societies, spanning many different ages, occupations, levels of education, and economic situations. To make the selection process more manageable, I picked two cities in each country as sampling points – Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia, and Berlin and Leipzig in Eastern Germany – and I conducted 15 interviews in each city. The choice of these particular cities allows complementarity, since Moscow and (East) Berlin are comparable in their unique significance, both in the past and in the present, as the capital and most important city, of their respective countries, and since St. Petersburg and Leipzig are comparable in their cultural and political significance, both historically and as the heart of dissident activity during the 1980s, as well as in their relative economic success today.

Although ideally one does not mix sampling methods across cases, the practical realities of my project were such that I had to follow two quite different sampling procedures. In Eastern Germany, the official survey institute FORSA, which also conducted the large-N survey, provided me with a list of people in Leipzig and Eastern Berlin who had agreed to be contacted by an American researcher interested in asking about their “life experiences.” Although the institute did not tally a response rate when gathering the names of and contact information for these respondents, only one person contacted by me declined to be interviewed.