Question

Explain why is a random sample typically not collected, and then develop a research question to determine how we would need to organize the study to use random sampling.

•STEP ONE: Define the population

•STEP TWO: Choose your sample size

•STEP THREE: List the population

•STEP FOUR: Assign numbers to the units

•STEP FIVE: Find random numbers

•STEP SIX: Select your sample

I need to answer the first part and then provide an example by answering all questions

Answer 1

Random sampling is one of the simplest forms of collecting data from the total population. Under random sampling, each member of the subset carries an equal opportunity of being chosen as a part of the sampling process. For example, the total workforce in organizations is 300 and to conduct a survey, a sample group of 30 employees is selected to do the survey. In this case, the population is the total number of employees in the company and the sample group of 30 employees is the sample. Each member of the workforce has an equal opportunity of being chosen because all the employees which were chosen to be part of the survey were selected randomly. But, there is always a possibility that the group or the sample does not represent the population as a whole, in that case, any random variation is termed as a sampling error.

An unbiased random sample is important for drawing conclusions. For example, when we took out the sample of 30 employees from the total population of 300 employees, there is always a possibility that a researcher might end up picking over 25 men even if the population consists of 200 men and 100 women. Hence, some variations when drawing results can come up, which is known as a sampling error. One of the disadvantages of random sampling is the fact that it requires a complete list of the population. For example, if a company wants to carry out a survey and intends to deploy random sampling, in that case, there should be the total number of employees and there is a possibility that all the employees are spread across different regions which make the process of survey little difficult. and it is a time-consuming and very difficult process to arrange, so, it is not use very much.

STEP ONE
Define the population

In our example, the population is the 10,000 students at the single university. The population is expressed as N. Since we are interested in all of these university students, we can say that our sampling frame is all 10,000 students. If we were only interested in female university students, for example, we would exclude all males in creating our sampling frame, which would be much less than 10,000 students.

STEP TWO
Choose your sample size

Let's imagine that we choose a sample size of 200 students. The sample is expressed as n. This number was chosen because it reflects the limit of our budget and the time we have to distribute our questionnaire to students. However, we could have also determined the sample size we needed using a sample size calculation, which is a particularly useful statistical tool. This may have suggested that we needed a larger sample size; perhaps as many as 400 students.

STEP THREE
List the population

To select a sample of 200 students, we need to identify all 10,000 students at the university. If you were actually carrying out this research, you would most likely have had to receive permission from Student Records (or another department in the university) to view a list of all students studying at the university.

STEP FOUR
Assign numbers to the units

We now need to assign a consecutive number from 1 to N, next to each of the students. In our case, this would mean assigning a consecutive number from 1 to 10,000 (i.e., N = 10,000; the population of students at the university).

STEP FIVE
Find random numbers

Next, we need a list of random numbers before we can select the sample of 200 students from the total list of 10,000 students. These random numbers can either be found using random number tables or a computer program that generates these numbers for you.

STEP SIX
Select your sample

Finally, we select which of the 10,000 students will be invited to take part in the research. In this case, this would mean selecting 200 random numbers from the random number table. Imagine the first three numbers from the random number table were:

0011	(the 11th student from the numbered list of 10,000 students)
9292	(the 9,292nd student from the list)
2001	(the 2,001st student from the list)

We would select the 11^th, 9,292^nd and 2,001^st students from our list to be part of the sample. We keep doing this until we have all 200 students that we want in our sample.