Sampling is “the action or process of taking samples of something for analysis.

According to Turner (2020), sampling is a research study’s use of a select subset of the targetted
population. Genarally research endeavors relie on smaller groups for data collection as the participation
of an entire targetted population is not feasible.

Sampling saves money by allowing researchers to gather the same answers from a sample that they
would receive from the population. Non-random sampling is significantly cheaper than random
sampling, because it lowers the cost associated with finding people and collecting data from them.

Glivenko and Cantelli the mathematicians who studied probability in the early 1900s found that if some
observations are randomly drawn from a population, they will naturally resemble the shape of the
population distribution. In other words, “as long as researchers randomly sample from a population and
obtain a sufficiently sized sample, then the sample will contain characteristics that roughly mirror those
of the population,” (ibid).

The intention of random sampling is to ascertain that every member of the population under study is
accorded an equal chance of being selected for participation in the study.

Random sampling occurs when a researcher ensures every member of the population being studied has
an equal chance of being selected to participate in the study, where ‘the population being studied’ can
refer to people who share a common quality or characteristic and not necessarily the entire
population.Thus,” a population is the group that researchers want to understand,” (ibid).

A sampling frame which is a list of all the people in the population under study, though unpractical at
times is used by researchers to understand a population using random sampling. For instance, accessing
a list of internet users. Then random selection of people can be made from the list to participate in the
study. However, in this case a non-random sample, in which every member of the population being
studied does not have an equal chance of being selected into the study is used although non-random
samples do not select participants based on probability which makes it difficult to ascertain if the sample
is representative enough, (Maxwell, 2009, p235).

“Despite this limitation, a wide range of behavioral science studies conducted within academia, industry
and government rely on non-random samples. When researchers use non-random samples, it is
common to control for any known sources of sampling bias during data collection. By controlling for
possible sources of bias, researchers can maximize the usefulness and generalizability of their data.”

Sampling is Important for Researchers as it saves limited resources like time, money and people. Hence,
small sample of people as opposed to the entire population are used with census as a notable exception,
among others. More so as “random sampling is much faster than surveying everyone in a population,
and obtaining a non-random sample is almost always faster than random sampling. Thus, sampling saves
researchers lots of time.”

Non-random sampling is significantly cheaper than random sampling, because it lowers the cost
associated with finding people and collecting data from them. Because all research is conducted on a
budget, saving money is important.
Opinion polls are useful when collecting a little bit of data from a lot of people, a study or ethnographic
interview for just a few people . Either way, sampling allows researchers to ask participants more
questions and to gather richer data than does contacting everyone in a population.

(Aaron Moss, Cheskie Rosenzweig, & Leib Litman, 2020)

REFERENCE

Turner - 2020 - Sampling Methods in Research Design -

Headachehttps://headachejournal.onlinelibrary.wiley.com › head

Maxwell, J. (2009). Designing a qualitative study. In L. Bickman and D, Rog (Eds.),

The SAGE Handbook of Applied Social Research Methods. (p. 214 – 253). SAGE

Publications

(Aaron Moss, Cheskie Rosenzweig, & Leib Litman, 2020)