Sampling in Research: The Benefit of Having a Representative Sample

STEP 2: Share a response. Your response should respond to the following:

What is the benefit of having a representative sample?

Find an empirical research article in an area of your interest (published in the past 10 years).

Note: An empirical research article is scientific article published in a journal that discusses an area of research, methodology, data collection, runs statistical analyses, and draw conclusions. You can find these types of articles via Google Scholar (Links to an external site.) or the MVC Library Database (Links to an external site.) (under Psychology and Behavioral Sciences Collection). An empirical research article is not like a Yahoo or Psychology Today article. Click here (Links to an external site.) to see an example of a scientific research article on the topic of adolescents’ attachment and prosocial and health protective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Once you have selected an article, discuss the sampling procedures (found in the Method | Participants section). These aren't always as clearly stated and that's okay. If the article you've selected has multiple studies, pick one and specify in your response (i.e., reporting on study #). Here's what you should report on:

How many participants are included? Remember, the larger the sample size the better able to sample is able to represent the population.

Identify if the researchers used a probability sampling or nonprobability sampling method. If it specifies what type, you can add that as well, but often it is not clearly stated. Note: research studies hardly ever use probability sampling, mostly because it is not feasible.

What population is the sample representative of? What population can the sample generalize to? Think about the demographics/characteristics of the participants (e.g., gender, age, ethnicity), geographic location, etc.