Making Sense of Research in Nursing, Health and Social Care by Pam Moule

Author:Pam Moule
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Sampling

It is unlikely that the researcher will be able to collect information from the entire target population. This would be both time consuming and expensive. The researcher collects information from a representative sample of the target population, selected by taking a sample from the target population.

A sample is a portion, or part of, the target population, and is composed of members (elements or subjects) from which information is collected. In health and social care research the target population may be a patient or client group and the sample will be a portion of that patient or client group.

The most important feature of sampling is the degree to which the sample represents the target population. For the sample to be representative, the members need to reflect the target population in as many ways as possible. For example, how closely do the characteristics or variables such as gender, age, social care needs, or medical diagnosis of the sample, reflect those of the target population?

The reduction of sampling bias is also of importance and can be seen if one part of the target population is over-represented or under-represented in the sample. For example, if the researcher was interested in measuring the effectiveness of health promotion strategies and chose to sample people attending health promotion clinics, it might be argued that those attending the clinics could have strong views about the benefits of the clinics, so may be a biased sample.

Limiting the difference between the target population and the sample is achieved to varying degrees through the application of accepted sampling techniques in the selection of samples. The two strategies used to select a sample are probability and non-probability sampling.

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