Quantitative Methods for the Social Sciences by Daniel Stockemer

Author:Daniel Stockemer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783319991184
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Quota Sampling

As implied in the word, quota sampling is a technique (which is frequently employed in online surveys), where sampling is done according to certain preestablished criteria. For example, many polls have an implicit quota. For example, customer satisfaction polls, membership polls, and readership polls all have an implicit quota. They are restricted to those that have purchased a product or service for customer satisfaction surveys, the members of an organization or party for membership surveys, and the readers of a journal, magazine, or online site for readership polls. Yet, quota sampling can also be deliberately used to increase the representativeness of the sample. For example, let us assume that a researcher wants to know how Americans think about same-sex marriage. Let us further assume that the researcher sets the sample size at 1000 people. Using an online questionnaire, she cannot get a random or fully representative sample, because still not everybody has continuous access to the Internet. Yet, what she can do is to make her sample representative of some characteristics such as gender and region. By setting up quotas, she can do this relatively easily. For example, as regions, she could identify the East, the Midwest, the West, and the South of the United States. For gender, she could split the sample so that she has 50% men and women. This gives her a quota of 125 men and 125 women for each region. Once, she reaches this quota, she closes the survey for this particular cohort (for the technical details on how this works, see also Fluid Survey University 2017). Using such a technique allows researchers to build samples that more or less reflect the population at least when it comes to certain characteristics. While it is cheaper than random sampling, quota sampling with the help of a survey company can still prove rather expensive. For example, using an online quota sampling for a short questionnaire on Germans’ knowledge and assessment of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which I conducted in 2014, I paid $8 per stratified survey. The stratification criteria I used were first gender balance and second the requirement that half the participants must reside in the East of Germany and the other half in the West.

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