SOCSCI 2J03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: The Technique, Focus Group, Sampling Error

• School: McMaster University
• Department: Social Sciences
• Course: SOCSCI 2J03
• Professor: R. Tahir

Document Summary

Why sample: time, in most cases, the size of the population is quite large, which means, conducting a census takes a long time, cost, cost of collecting info from all members of pop. Impossibility of conducting a census: may not be possible to identify and access each member of pop. If wanting to study homeless people: sometimes conducting survey means destroying items included in survey (estimate the mean life of lightbulbs would mean burning out all bulbs in the survey) Random sample vs non-random sample: random sample is a sample drawn in such a way that each member of pop has some chance of being selected. In this sampling technique, each sample of the same size has the same probability of being selected. We repeat this experiment four more times: the 5 drawn names make up a simple random sample.