Question

In a manufacturing plant, a work center is a specific production facility that consists of one or more people and or machines and is treated as one unit for the purposes of capacity requirements planning and job scheduling. If the jobs arrive at a particular work center at a faster rate than they depart, the work center impedes the overall production process and is referred to as a bottleneck. This sample was collected by an operations manager for use in investigating a potential bottleneck work center. There are 315 hours in the work week when items can come into the work center. The manager selects every 15th hour and counts how many items come into the work center during that hour. What type of sample is this?

a. Simple Random Sample b. Judgment Sample c. Cluster Sample d. Systematic Sample e. Quota Sample f. Convenience Sample g. Stratified Random Sample

Answer 1

Solution:

Systematic sampling: Systematic sampling is a method of sampling in which we select the first sampling unit at random and then other sampling units are selected on the basis of a fixed sampling interval. This interval is calculated by dividing the population size by the sample size. Suppose at random we have selected i^{​​​​​}​​​​​​th unit as first sampling unit and our fixed sampling interval is k then, according to systematic sampling method every kth unit after the ith unit will be our sampling unit.

In the given question operation manager is selecting every 15 th hour as a sampling unit it means he is taking the sampling unit according to a fixed sampling interval. Therefore, this is a systematic sample.