Nabila, a Master’s student, wanted to investigate the motivations of social entrepreneurs for her research project. In reviewing relevant academic and practitioner literature, she had found there was limited research that considered social entrepreneurs in ‘later life’ (Hatak, et al. 2015; Singh and De Noble 2003). ‘Later life social entrepreneurs’ is a term used to refer to individuals aged 50 and over who set up a social enterprise to address a specific social, environmental or a cultural need. On investigating further, she also discovered that there was an interest from the UK government to extend the economic and social participation of individuals aged 50 and over (Department for Work and Pensions 2014). This was driven by the increase in the number of people aged 50 and over who are reaching the retirement age compared to the working age population (persons aged between 15 and 64 years who are in employment).
Based on this review of the literature, Nabila decided to conduct a study of social entrepreneurs aged 50 and over for her research project. More specifically, she wanted to find out what motivated these individuals to become social entrepreneurs. In particular she was interested in their social orientations, the influence of prior professional experiences on their decision to set up a social enterprise, and the challenges they faced in their everyday lives as social entrepreneurs. She phrased this as four interrelated investigative questions:
1 Why have people aged 50 and over become social entrepreneurs?
2 What is the relationship between their previous career background and their decision to set up a social enterprise?
3 How do they view their everyday experiences as social entrepreneurs?
4 What challenges do social entrepreneurs aged 50 and over face?

Nabila decided to undertake a qualitative study collecting data through semi-structured interviews as these would provide opportunities for open conversation to take place, enabling her and the participants to talk about ideas they saw as significant. However, Nabila had to think carefully about how many interviews she needed to undertake, how to gain access to potential participants and how to select her sample. Fortunately, a friend who worked for a charity that supports social entrepreneurs agreed to act as her gatekeeper, brokering access to social entrepreneurs who had been supported by the charity. The charity agreed to provide her with an anonymised list of over 200 social entrepreneurs from whom she could select those she wanted to interview. The charity would then make the request for the interview on Nabila’s behalf and, if the social entrepreneur agreed, provide Nabila with their contact details. She now faced the challenges of how many participants would be needed and how to select them.

Nabila decided she would plan to interview 30 participants as she felt this was a reasonable number. All potential participants would have to satisfy two criteria to be selected. Firstly, they would have to be social entrepreneurs with real-life experience of running a social enterprise, in other words the participants‘ enterprises needed to have explicit social, environment, and cultural aims. Secondly participants would have to be aged 50 and over at the time of the interview. Fortunately, the charity could provide such data for all the social entrepreneurs they had supported. At her next meeting with her project tutor Nabila outlined the criteria for selecting her sample and her intended sample size. The project tutor appeared concerned by what Nabila was saying and asked a number of questions, which Nabila was unable to answer. These included:

1 Provide me with the reason why your plan is to interview 30 rather than 15 or even 50 entrepreneurs who meet your criteria.
2 You have explained how you intend to select your sample without making any reference to the type of sampling or the technique you intend to use. Can you state whether you intend to use either probability or non-probability sampling and explain why?
3 It is likely that the anonymised list of over 200 social entrepreneurs provided by the charity will contain more than 30 who meet your criteria fully. If this is the case how will you select those you actually want to interview? You need to name the sampling technique or techniques you intend to use and provide me with a clear justified exposition.
4 Outline the concept of data saturation and explain how you could usefully apply this to the research you are planning to undertake.

Question
1 Develop clear fully justified answers to each of the four questions asked by Nabila’s project tutor.