Sampling a range of settings in qualitative interviewing

I’m saving this account from Andrew Chadwick’s The Hybrid Media System because I want to come back to it later. From pg 185:

I chose these interviewees because I wanted to “sample” a range of different political and media settings: those associated with formal organizations but also those working in nonorganizational settings, or settings whose precariousness, contingency, or what we might term “boundariness” were what made them interesting as subjects of study, given the initial research questions that fueled this book.

This fieldwork sample is not, of course, meant to be representative of the hugely diverse media system of contemporary Britain. No set of in-depth qualitative interviews could ever achieve that status and it would be unwise to assume that it might. However, my interview subjects, and the norms they reveal as important, add up to what I believe is a convincing figurative representation of daily practice in the hybrid media system.