Question

A new cable company is thinking of moving into the area, but they want to know how many of the local households still subscribe to cable television. As a new competitor to the region, they don't have access to customer records, so they want to sample households in the area. Below are several proposed sampling methods. Which of them are considered good sampling methods? Assume that all the households in the area exist on some reasonable form of a "block) Select one or more: a. Go to the 30 closest households to the cable company's new office b. Get a list of all the households in the area, and then randomly pick 50 of them c. Get a list of all the households in the area, organize them based on the five major neighborhoods, and randomly pick ten households from each of the neighborhoods d. Get a list of all the households in the area, organize them based on the first letter in the house's address, and then pick 25 from the A-K list and 25 from the L-Z list e. Get a list of all the blocks in the area, randomly pick ten blocks, and then go to all the households on those ten chosen blocks

Answer 1

In this case, all the households in the area exist on some reasonable form of a block.

So, either we have to randomly select some blocks and sample all the households of those blocks or we have to randomly select specific number of households from each block i.e. either we have to go for cluster sampling or stratified sampling.

Hence, sampling strategies could be to get a list of all the households in the area, organize them based on major neighborhoods and randomly select households from each of the neighborhoods.Or, we can randomly select some blocks and get a list of all the households in those blocks.

Hence, Option (c) and (e) are correct choices. (Ans).