I selected five firms in an industrial sector (where total number of firms in that sector was more than 1,000). These selected five firms comprised of 2,090 relevant individuals who I was interested to contact for the participation in a survey study. A sample of 1,000 was drawn randomly from these 2,090 potential participants and a survey was sent to them. I received 337 usable responses which were then used for the analysis.
In your opinion what is the best way to report the above sampling procedure in terms of target population, sampling frame etc? Any authentic reference will be much appreciated please.
Hello Fawad,
If your set of five companies was the entire population of interest, then you started with a census sample of companies. If these are simply representative (or easily available, or had some other reason to recommend their selection), then the companies would represent a convenience sample from the population. The ideal approach would have been to randomly sample the 5 target companies (or however many were deemed necessary) from the population of companies under consideration.
For this set of five companies, a simple random sample (of about 50% of cases) was chosen for solicitation to participate. By the way, that's a pretty large number, so your sample--if everyone solicited indeed participated--would have yielded good estimates of just about any parameter for this set of five companies. (In the future, a proportional or stratified random sample would likely be a better choice in terms of efficiency and representation.) The overall response rate ran about 34% of those sampled, so in your results you'd have to acknowledge the potential that volunteer bias might have resulted in a sample that isn't fully representative of all company employees.
Good luck with your work.
Thank You David for your detailed response.
In fact, the 5 firms were chosen based on a predefined criteria. Random sampling could have resulted in selection of firms that may not be fulfilling this criteria. Moreover, I was not sure how many more firms would be meeting this criteria. Therefore, what I have understood from your response is that I have chosen five firms based on convenience sample. How can this be convincingly reported?
thanks Fawad Sadiq for asking such a question. First you need to get the sampling frame of each firm (if you don't you can't do probability sampling, may be some people may argue clustering). after getting sampling frame you need to take probability proportional to size, then use SRS to select the required sample from each firm
@ Mohamed Hayir Tahlil Mohamud thank you for your candid inputs. I have the sampling frame for each firm. However, now my question is how to justify the selection of these five firms for generalizing the study findings.
Hello again, Fawad,
Your selection of the five firms was purposive, and made with intent to fulfill whatever conditions/criteria you had set for your screening method. Just be clear as to what those conditions/criteria were and give an explanation of why you imposed them as the basis for firm selection. That lets readers judge for themselves how applicable the results might be to their target universe.
Good luck with finishing your work.
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