In: Statistics and Probability
Suppose a client is working on research project for her master’s degree in nursing. She plans to survey registered nurses (RN’s) in Ohio to get their opinions related to the opioid crisis. The target population is all RN’s in Ohio with active registrations. The client has obtained access to a list of all currently registered RN’s in Ohio, along with their contact information and nursing specialty.
Part A. The client plans to use a random number generator to select 800 nurses from this list and contact them by mail, email, and phone, asking them to complete the survey. What type of sampling method is being attempted here? Despite the use of this method, explain how there may still be bias related to which nurses participate.
Part B. An alternative plan for selecting the nurses might be better if the client also wants to summarize the opinions of nurses separately for various specialty areas, such as Psychiatric, Hospice Care, Post-Op, and Other. Name the type of sampling method and suggest how the client may go about selecting the sample.
Part A:
The Survey has Non-Response Bias. When the client contacts them by mail, email, and phone, asking them to complete the survey, the registered nurses (RN’s) in Ohio may not take the trouble of completing the survey because there is no compulsion or incentive in responding to the survey and thus the response rate will be very low, making the result of the survey unreliable.
Part B:
The sampling method is Stratified Sampling.
The client may go about selecting the sample as follows:
Step 1: Obtain the list of all registered nurses (RN’s) in Ohio . This is the population size = N
Step 2: Obtain the Sample Size = n = the number of registered nurses (RN’s) in Ohio to be selected for the sample.
Step 3: Obtain the number of nurses separately for various specialty areas, such as Psychiatric, Hospice Care, Post-Op, and Other.
Step 4: calculate the samples to be selected from each specialty area according to its strength such as n = n1 + n2 + ..+ nk where k is the number of specialty areas.
Step 5: Through Simple Random Sample technique, obtain n1, n2, ...nk from each specialty area.
The required sample is achieved in this method.