All adult U.S. citizens are required to participate in the decennial census, but

Question

All adult U.S. citizens are required to participate in the decennial census, but some do not. Some social scientists have argued for putting more resources into getting a large representative sample so the census takers can secure higher rates of response from hard-to-include groups. Do you think that the U.S. Census should shift to a probability-based sampling design? Why or why not? What might you suggest in order to obtain a higher response rate from some of these hard-to-include groups?

Chapter 6 begins with some alternative explanations for recent changes in the homicide rate. Which of the explanations make the most sense to you? Why? How could you learn more about the effect on crime of one of the "causes" you have identified in a laboratory experiment? What type of study could you conduct in the community to assess its causal impact?

Explanation / Answer

The likely degree of error in an estiamate of a population characteristic based on a probability sample decreases when the size of the sample and the homogeneity of the population from which the sample was selected increases. The proportion of the population that is sampled does not affect sampling error except when that population is large. The degree of sampling errors affecting a sample statistic can be estimated from the characteristocs of the sample and the knowledge of the properties of the sampling distributions.

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