In Mumbai, I interviewed seven men, four of whom were in their 20s and five of whom were in relationships. In New York, I interviewed 11 gay men, whose ages were from 33 to 72 and included five African- and Caribbean-American men and two men who were HIV positive. For example, in Auckland, I interviewed 12 men who were drawn from a variety of classes and ethnic backgrounds, including two retired men who had had working-class jobs in the transport sector and three Maori. Typically, qualitative samples can ‘represent’ or provide a sense of the possible range of views, experiences, processes found in the wider population but cannot represent their numerical distribution. Qualitative samples can be ‘quite large’, as was the overall sample I used for this book, or they can be ‘relatively small’, as are a number of the city samples I used.
By its very nature, a qualitative sample can never represent the population it purports to study.
