In a large city school districut with twenty elementary schools, the school boar

Question

In a large city school districut with twenty elementary schools, the school board is considering the adoption of a new policy that would require students to pass a test in order to be promoted to the next grade. The advisory board wants to find out whether parents agree with this plan. Listed below are some ideas for gathering data:

For Each:
- Name the sampling design
- identify any basis
- indicate whether of not you think the propsed sampling scheme is a good one for meethign objectives of the adviory board

a. place an ad in the local newspaper askiing people to log their opinions on the adviosry boards website

b. randomly select one of the schools and contact every parent by phone

c. send a survey home with every student in the districkt. and ask parent to fill it our and return it

d. randomly select twenty parents from each school. Send them a survey and follow up with a phone call if they don't return it within a week.

Explanation / Answer

a)

Type: non-probability: Voluntary sampling method

Any Bias: Since it is purely based on human choice to participate rather than random selection, it is hard to explain how the data might behave and thus, the sampling method is introducing potential sources of bias.

The proposed sampling scheme is not a good one for meeting the objectives of the advisory board as it won’t be true or say random representation of the population.

b)

Type: Probability: Cluster sampling method

Any Bias: One particular school may not represent every section of parents. The school may have bias towards specific income, religion, region, etc. and sampling from such a school will be biased.

Again, the proposed sampling scheme may not a good one for meeting the objectives for the aforementioned reasons.

c)

Type: Total population sampling

Any Bias: The problem with such sampling technique is non-responsiveness. Since, it includes whole population, it is little hard to implement. However, if everyone responds, which is not likely, it won’t introduce bias and can be a good data.

Even though, it has merits, I won’t recommend it as it is covering whole population (district) and as long as it is covering whole district, it is not Sampling. Besides, there is a big assumption that everyone will respond.

d)

Type: Stratified sampling

Any Bias: It should be unbiased.

I think, this is the approach to go as it randomly selects students from each school which removes any bias that the previous approaches would have introduced.

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