Question

Sociologists argued that women on average earn less than men as women often choose to work less hours. They further suggest that the choice of hours worked may be driven by various factors such as age, childcare needs, occupation choice and flexibility. To investigate the relation between hours worked and income earned by Australian men and women, a researcher plans to survey a sample of individuals across the country. Briefly explain (using no more than 250 words in total for this question)

a) What type of survey method the researcher could use and why?

b) What sampling method could the researcher use to select his/her sample and why?

c) What are the two main variables the researcher should consider collecting data for the purpose of the above analysis and why? Identify the data type(s) for the variables.

d) What kind of issues the researcher may face in this data collection?

Suppose a researcher has collected data from a sample of 65 individuals using the sampling method you have proposed in (b). For each individual, the hours worked per week and yearly income (measured in ‘000’s dollars) were recorded. The data are stored in file HOURSWORKED.xls.

Answer 1

solution:

given data:

a)

The researcher could use the online survey method to collect the data because the researcher is interested to survey a sample of individuals across the country hence approaching the population through any other medium will be very costly.

b)

The researcher could use cluster sampling because it will be easy for the researcher to find homogeneous groups of men and women across the country and cluster sampling requires fewer resources as compared to the other probability sampling methods.

c)

The two main variables of interest are hours worked and income. These two variables are the main variables because we want to investigate the hours worked and income earned by Australian men and women. Both variables are of ratio data type.

d)

The researcher will face the following issues in the data collection:

1. Finding an appropriate channel to send the survey to the sampled units.

2. Getting fully engaged responses for the whole survey as no one is there to monitor.

3. If the response is not received then repeated requests to complete the survey will make the participants annoyed.

4. It is difficult to check whether the survey is done by the right person or not if an identification tool is not used.

5. It is difficult to reach participants who do not access the internet.

6. Most importantly getting the list for the sampled clusters.

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