hi Amachree Ibi-Ilate

I dont know why you are using either word, quite frankly; they are both irrelevant. It sounds as if you have not really narrowed down what it is you are researching. Do you have a hypothesis? What are your aims? Until you can answer these two questions you will continue to be confused. You really need to have a big think about what you want to acheive in this piece of research. Your supervisor should be guiding your reading so that you can make informed decisions, about your work which should be an extension of what has been done previously, or you are copying a paradigm that has already been successfully used. You can also guide your own work by using the internet to do some basic research. Google can throw up much useful information. Hope this helps.

That is neither homogenous nor heterogenous, it is a regular targeted sample based on age and socioeconomic status, and while some advisors would suggest classifying it is is not really relevant now is it? You are thinking of random/non-random sample I believe, in which case it is definitely not random!

You can set any kind of eligibility criteria you want, as long as they clearly meet the purposes of your research.

But with IPA you usually use very small samples, so I am not sure how you achieve meaningful heterogeneity with regard to both gender and education.

Think it would be a good idea not to have preconceived divisions. Using a large sample, there would be cases where you will not get data and you will then be able to classify your data into the categories you mention. My sample was basically whoever was willing to provide me information from multiple sites and my visit to factories.