Question

A textbook publisher would like to know students preferences when it comes to using e-books vs. traditional hard -copy text books. They have hired you to conduct a statistical study for them. obviously ,you cannot speak to every college student on every campus ,so you will have to select a sample to work with..

1, Which of the sampling technique would you use to select your sample.

2. why would you choose this particular sampling technique for this study?

3. What are the pros and cons of the sampling technique that you have chosen.

Answer 1

1.

The sampling technique that I would use to select the sample is Stratified random sampling.

2.

I would choose this particular sampling technique for this study in order to obtain a more representative sample. Dividing the population of interest (all the students) into sub-groups such as college wise, or area wise to select the sample of students would be more representative of the population.

3.

Pros:

It provides better coverage of the entire population and would be representative of the population. So, the sampling bias is reduced.

Cons:

It cannot be used in some studies where we cannot confidently classify each member of the population into a sub-group.

There is a problem of overlapping where subjects fall into multiple sub-groups which leads to sampling bias.