Sampling

What is sampling?

Sampling is the act, process, or technique of selecting a suitable sample, or a representative part of a population for the purpose of determining characteristics of the whole population.

Why sampling?

A sample may provide you with needed information quickly, hence less time is wasted. Futhermore, since population is very large number, doing a sampling can help the researcher to reduce his time and money. He only have to choose a number of sample with the characteristics that he/she chooses to study to represent the whole population.

However, one of the most frequent causes is sampling error. For example, suppose that a sample of 100 Bruneian women are measured and are all found to be taller than five feet. It is very clear even without any statistical prove that this would be a highly unrepresentative sample leading to invalid conclusions. This is a very unlikely occurance because naturally such rare cases are widely distributed among the population. But it can occur. Luckily, this is a very obvious error and can be etected very easily.

How about biasness in sampling?

Sampling bias is a tendency to favour the selection of units that have paticular characteristics. It is usually the result of a poor sampling plan.

For futher information on sampling, please click this link http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/ and the S-Cool link on the left on research methods.