Question

A large telecommunications corporation is planning to issue a new scheme involving a revision of its pay scheme. The scheme involves plans to raise the basic salary and reduce overtime payment. It is believed that there might be different views about the scheme among staff — namely between general support staff and technical staff who are more frequently required to work overtime. The percentages of the two categories of staff to the whole corporation are about 80% and 20% respectively. The Director of Human Resources is going to solicit the views of the staff in general about the revision. As all the selected members of staff are to be interviewed face-to-face, he can only take a sample of size 50.

(a) Elaborate briefly on how to collect a simple random sample from the corporation to collect relevant views of staff about the revision of the pay scheme.

(b) Comment on the suitability of using cluster sampling to collect the required sample where one cluster containing general supporting staff and another cluster containing the technical staff are to be formed.

(c) Other than the aforementioned two sampling methods, cite another sampling method that is better in general for collecting a representative sample to reflect the views of staff about the revision of the pay scheme. Explain briefly.

Answer 1

a) A simple random sample could be pickd up from the list of employees working there.

For example, assign numbers to those members and may be run in excel random numbers or choose randomly the numbers.

b) Cluster sampling refers to a type of samplingmethod . With cluster sampling, the researcher divides the population into separate groups, calledclusters. Then, a simple random sample of clustersis selected from the population. The researcher conducts his analysis on data from the sampledclusters.

So, in this we might only choose one group between general and tgechnical staff and dont consider ither group. This will not help us. So, cluster sampling should be avoided here.

c) Stratified sampling

Stratified sampling refers to a type of sampling method . With stratified sampling, the researcher divides the population into separate groups, called strata. Then, a probability sample (often a simple random sample ) is drawn from each group.