POLI 2P80 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Sampling Frame, Random Number Table, Snowball Sampling
17 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Researchers are faced with a problem: the populations we wish to study are almost always so large that we are unable to gather information from every case. Solution: the researcher chooses a sample- a carefully chosen subset of the population- and use information gathered from the cases in the sample to generalize to the population why sample. We should collect a sample that is representative of the population you are studying. Representative: the sample has the same characteristics as the population. Example: instead of surveying every brock student, a researcher will select a small number of brock students. Selecting only female chys majors may be a problem, it is not representative of all brock students why representative. It is important to be inclusive and reflect the community we wish to study. An unrepresentative sample can (and likely will) lead to a biased or inaccurate result furthermore, it is not accurate (it misses the target) a representative sample is important.
