Pilot Deviant Case Sampling — Stress-Testing Instruments with Outlier Cases

Pilot deviant case sampling is a purposive sampling strategy applied during a pilot phase in which participants are deliberately selected because they represent extreme, unusual, or atypical instances of the phenomenon under study. Rather than seeking representative participants for the pilot run, the researcher intentionally recruits outlier cases to probe the boundaries of research instruments, interview guides, or data collection protocols before the main study begins.