I want to commpare the diversity and prevalence of some blood parasites/hemoprotozoan parasites, ectoparasites and endoparasites in bats. I will be using two different locations (campuses) in Nigeria as my study sites. There is no documentation of the population of these bats, so how do I determine my sample size that will be acceptable?
I want to be able to justify the number of bats I will be sampling.
Thanks.
Hi Okoh, this links have how identified blood parasites in bats(plasmodium, leishmania, maleria)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020751915000442
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0074-02762008000400018
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/43/17415.full
Thanks very much Hadeel. I have the papers the links leads to. None of the three papers stated how its sample size was determined, rather each just stated the number of bats it sampled.
From the links:
1. Hector De Lima et al (Isolation and Molecular Identification of Leishmania...) sampled just eleven, 11; bats
2. Juliane Schaer et al 2010; (High Diversity of West African Bat Malaria Parasites...) sampled 274 bats
3. Juliane Schaer et al 2015 (Nycteria Parasites of Afrotropical insectivorous Bats) sampled 141 bats
How the sample size was determined was not declared.
Using the formula below to determine the sample size of unknown population (1.96)2pq / d2, I have 384 bats; taking my p as 0.5 and my d (sampling error) as 0.05 (5%).
You can see that the differences are quite significantThis was what necessitated my question.
To calculate the sample size based on the sample required to estimate a proportion with an approximate 95% confidence level1 , you can use the following formula:
nr=4pq/d2
n=4*0.5*o.5/0.052
So minimum sample size would be 400.
p = 0.5
q = 1-0.5 = 0.5
margin of error of ± 5% so you set d = 0.05
more accurate formula : n=(1.96)2 pq/d2
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