Identifying Sampling Strategies - Answers
You were asked to identify sampling approaches for each of the five studies linked below. Indented answers are provided. As you will see, it is not always obvious which sampling strategy was employed by authors. Readers often must piece together information to determine which sampling approach was employed.
Answers
1. What type of sampling appears to have been used in this study by Yildirim, Ozden, and Aksu (2001; look in Method section for a section describing Participants)?
Information on sampling is found in the Participant section (page 210 of article, page 4 of PDF). This example is difficult to classify. The author presents this sentence:
“The school was assigned for the study by the Educational Research and Development Directorate from among a group of high schools (N = 6) established as laboratory schools by the Ministry of Education.”
What type of sampling was employed?
Since no type of randomized selection was discussed, this appears to be convenience sampling. However, the author also presents this:
“Among the 3 ninth-grade classrooms in the assigned school, one was chosen through simple random selection.”
So, with this bit of information, what type of sampling is this?
This may be cluster sampling due to the randomized selection of a group rather than the randomized selection of individuals.
In short, it appears to have a mixture of sampling approaches, convenience since subjects were taken from one school, but aspects of cluster sampling since a group (classroom) was randomly selected from that school.
2. Abass (2009) employed what type of sampling?
On page 2 of the PDF the author writes this:
“Subjects were volunteers, certified medically and physically fit to take part in the training programme. They were randomly divided into four groups of 10 participants each. Three of these groups served as the experimental groups that participated in the depth jumping, rebound jumping and horizontal jumping exercises, while the fourth was the control group.”
What type of sampling here?
This is convenience. Some folks may be confused by the “randomly divided into four groups” wording. Note that sampling is the act of selecting participants, but once you have participants and then sort them other ways, that is not sampling, that is assignment, and is a different process from sampling. We will discuss assignment in more detail when discussing types of quantitative research.
3. What type of sampling did Hughes (2008) use in his study?
On page 4 of the PDF the author writes:
“A cross-sectional survey was undertaken for the purpose of studying the statistical relationships between sense of humor, and its dimensions, and PsyCap, and its dimensions. Surveys were administered to 92 participants from a wide cross-section of employers.”
Any idea of the type of sampling used here?
Not enough information given in the Participants section, but the author also writes this in the Procedures section (pages 4 and 5 of PDF):
“During a presentation to small business leaders in the western U.S., the author requested access to their workplaces for the purpose of survey response data. Seventeen sites agreed to the request. “
and this too:
“The author met with members of these respective workplaces to explain the purpose of the study, however the participants were blind to the hypotheses. Those interested volunteered to complete the survey.”
Given this additional description of sampling, it appears to be convenience sampling.
4. Which sampling approach was used by Davies and Bremer (1999)?
The authors write this on page 3 of the PDF:
“All Year 2 and Year 6 children in five randomly selected primary schools within one Local Education Authority (LEA) comprised the sample.”
Given this description, it appears to be cluster sampling.
5. What type of sampling occurred in this study by Wasson, Beare, and Wasson (1990)?
On page 1 of the PDF, the authors write this:
“We chose subjects who were the 3 best and the 3 worst readers in each of the three classrooms at each of the six grade levels.”
Looks like maximum variation sampling (a type of purposive sampling [see chat notes on sampling and qualitative research notes]).