Sampling

• what is target population?

  • group of people who are the focus of the researchers interest
  • shares a certain characteristic
• what is sampling?

  • a representative & 'typical' sample will be investigated instead
  • a group of people who take part in a research investigation, the sample is drawn from the target population and is presumed to be representative of that population
• • the aim is to be able to generalise the findings from the sample group back to the target population
  • if our sample is unbiased, we can generalise the results back to the target population = population validity
• biased sample


  a sample that is not representative of the target population
• 7 sampling techniques:

  opportunity

  self-selecting/volunteer

  random

  snowball

  systematic

  stratified

  quota