I will be inviting participants to complete a web-based survey through posting advertisements on local community Facebook groups. The target population in the study are individuals who reside in a particular county, and therefore the Facebook advertisements are only posted in local community groups from that county.
Would this be convenience sampling, as I have seen social media platform sampling methods commonly associated with convenience sampling as they happen to be the most accessible to the researcher. Or is this purposive sampling as the survey advertisements are purposefully being located in community Facebook groups of the specific geographical location of the target population of the study with the in view of recruiting the most useful participants for the specific purpose of the study?
If you are sending it to particular FB groups with lists of people, and sending it to all the people, you are attempting a census of this group, though there will be a low response rate. Part of this is that for most facebook groups many people are not active (and I'm on one group outside of where I live, but that I go to a lot, and probably most of the people live outside that area on that FB group, so be careful), and others just do not respond. But you can likely get a list of members (and duplicates across the different groups) and calculate a response rate. Of course the target population is different from all community members as likely many will not be in those groups. The phrase "convenience sampling" is odd and sometimes get used as "whatever is convenient", but that is not a very useful definition. Anyway, what you call something is not important. Just describe what you did and what those groups are like (e.g., the duplicates, the response rates from each, etc.). I assume you are doing things to help the response rate.
It is up to you whether to report response rates. I think the points I raised above mean that a lot of the people in the groups won't see it. As far as getting the usernames of members, I think if you are a member of the group you likely can see the names, so can store these in a file, remove duplicates, to get the number that could have responded.
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