You want to investigate the workplace attitudes concerning new policies that wer

Question

You want to investigate the workplace attitudes concerning new policies that were put into effect. You have funding and support to contact at most 100 people. Choose a design method and discuss the following:

Describe the sample design method you will use and why. (2 pts)

Specify the population and sample group. Will you include everyone who works for the company, certain departments, full or part-time employees, etc.? (2 pts)

Discuss the bias, on the part of both the researcher and participants. (2 pts)

Explanation / Answer

This situation is definitely a candidate for Stratified Sampling. The strata that works here are there major departments in which the organization can be divided (HR, Operations, Sales, Product Team etc). This sampling method is required because we must take inputs from the different teams/ departments to get the holistic view of attitude towards new policies. So simple random samples should be taken from these departments, somewhat proportional to their size. For ex, if there are 5 departments with sizes (100, 50, 200, 25, 75, 50) then the sample sizes for each of them should be (20, 10, 40, 5, 15, 10) respectively.

The population is the entire employee strength, and sample groups are the various departments. Everyone need not be included, but a random sample from each department as discussed. Full time employees should be preferred, as part time employees do not spend their entire time with company and hence may not have exposure to the policy, and knowledge of its implications.

The bias comes into picture in this method, if the investigation is direct. That means, if the identity of the surveyed person is open, then they may not choose to reveal their true feedback, they may hide some negative connotations. Hence, only if a completely anonymous survey is done, we may get unbiased feedback. Another inherent bias is that some departments, particularly HR who have themselves implemented the policy, may favor the policy irrespective of their true feelings towards it. Similarly there may be some other kind of bias in other departments.

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