Business Statistics Made Easy in SAS

Correct Sampling

As discussed briefly in the previous chapter, if you wish to make inferences about a certain population of observations, then gathering all the data from the entire population is obviously best. However you often cannot do this for practical reasons such as difficulty and cost. For example, you might need to survey only a sample of your employees to ascertain job satisfaction and similar constructs, with the task of using these sample-based results to make inferences to the general population.

Choosing the correct sample that will do a good job of reflecting the broader population is important and desirable. You need to know many aspects of research methodology in order to do sampling really well. The following are perhaps ...