Exam 15: Writing Reports

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A convenience sample is a group of subjects who are easy to get: students who walk through the union, people at a shopping mall, workers in your own unit. Convenience samples are useful for a rough pretest of a questionnaire and may be acceptable for some class research projects. However, you cannot generalize from a convenience sample to a larger group.
A purposive or judgment sample is a group of people whose views seem useful. Someone interested in surveying the kinds of writing done on campus might ask each department for the name of a faculty member who cared about writing and then send surveys to those people.
In a random sample, each person in the population theoretically has an equal chance of being chosen. When people say they did something "randomly," they often mean "without conscious bias." However, unconscious bias exists. Someone passing out surveys in front of the library will be more likely to approach people who seem friendly and less likely to ask people who seem intimidating, in a hurry, much older or younger, or of a different race, class, or sex. True random samples rely on random digit tables, published in texts and online. If you take a true random sample, you can generalize your findings to the whole population from which your sample comes.