Question

Your organization has asked you to estimate the proportion of current employees who expect to retire by the age of 65. Develop an appropriate sampling frame and sampling approach to facilitate this task. Note: Your sample must be random. Outline the data collection process you would employ. Additionally, provide a substantive response to the following questions: What considerations need to be made when defining and collecting information from a sample? What problems might you encounter and how frequently might they occur?

Answer 1

For the given scenario, we have to find the estimate for the proportion of current employees who expect to retire by the age of 65. So for this scenario, all employees in the organizations would be considered as the population. We need to find out the random sample from this population. The following data collection process would be employed for finding the required proportion of employees who expect to retire by the age of 65.

First of all, we need to decide the proper and adequate sample size. We have to select a random sample from the population of all employees. By the thumb rule used for selection of sample size, many researchers consider 10% of the population as their sample, so we will consider 10% of the population size as a sample size for this study. The sample size should be adequate for drawing unbiased estimate for the population proportion of employees who expect to retire by the age of 65 from this study. Also, it is important to use the proper random sampling technique for the selection of a random sample. If there is only one department of employees or all employees are working in the same department, then we will consider a simple random sampling technique for selection of the random sample. If there are many departments in organizations in which employees are work, then we will consider the stratified random sampling technique for the selection of the random sample. After the selection of a random sample, we will ask the research question to each employee selected in the random sample. We use a suitable medium for data collection such as personal interview, questionnaire, telephonic interview, online survey method, etc. After collection of responses from the selected employees, we will find out the estimate for the proportion of employees who expect to retire by the age of 65.

During the process of data collection, we might encounter some problems such as non-response from a selected employee, underestimate or overestimate response from the employee, etc. Sometimes, the responses to this research question would depend on the age group of the employee, the fitness level of the employee, etc. So, responses would change after some years due to different conditions of the employees.