There are advantages and disadvantages of using different sampling methods in social research. This article describes them.
1. The advantage of the household survey method is that it provides a sample of the entire population of a country or region. Such a survey could be useful if you want to find out what people in the area think, such as getting opinions on an issue to help a politician take a position on a bill for a new park or park improvements. This type of survey could also be useful for the government to use to find out people’s preferences about a recreational facility for the area, such as whether they would prefer a zoo or a nature park and who would be interested in going.
One disadvantage of the household survey is that it is time consuming and labor intensive to try to obtain a sample of everyone in the total population. Also, while most organizations conducting national surveys seek to use multistage and cluster sampling to make the sample collection process more manageable, there can be problems in doing so. For example, if researchers try to reduce costs by interviewing a certain number of people on the street and choosing every nth house, they might make the number of groups too small to include a full range of people in the area. Then, too, researchers might find that people in certain types of households might not want to participate in the survey, most notably those from lower-class households, which would skew the sample to have a higher percentage of middle-income and middle-income people represented. than its percentage in the population.
2. The advantage of sampling for a site, user, or visitor survey is that one can get feedback from a population that is actually using a facility or visiting a site. Another advantage is that randomness can be controlled by having a trained interviewer select the nth person who passes the interviewer or the nth person the interviewer passes after concluding an interview with the previously selected person. This approach can also be adapted for a quota sample, where the interviewer is asked to find the nth person for a number of categories, and as each category is filled, the interviewer stops looking for someone for that category. .
A disadvantage of this approach is that an interviewer may not follow interview selection procedures and may select someone who seems suitable or avoid other types of interviewees who are more difficult to find or interview. Another con is that the types of people that come at different times of the day can vary, such as having more families with children that come during the day and teenagers that come at night to an amusement park. As a result, sampling could become unrepresentative unless weight is given or a quota sampling approach is used to balance different types of people. Another drawback could be the non-response problem, if the people who enter or leave the site do not want to be disturbed: those who enter because they are eager to enjoy the site and those who leave because they are anxious to get home. Yet another disadvantage if a questionnaire is used is that many respondents may not complete the questionnaire and those who do may not be representative of the whole group, particularly if there is a high response rate. In addition, site staff may not carefully deliver questionnaires, and it can be difficult to supervise these staff as their priority is helping visitors and guests, rather than assisting with a survey.
3. The advantage of sampling for a street survey is that it can be good for finding out who is using a particular street, shopping or tourist area, much like a survey of sites, users or visitors. Such a street survey can be combined with a quota sampling approach to obtain information on different types of users or visitors arriving at the site at different times, if the population background in the area is known.
However, the disadvantage of a street survey, just like a site, user or visitor survey, is that people on the street may be busy and may not want to take the time to participate in an interview or may not be interested in complete a test. As a result, the sample will be skewed as a result of differences between those who respond or complete a questionnaire and those who do not. Another disadvantage in some areas is the potential danger of stopping and interviewing people on the street. For example, in a downtown area, people may be suspicious of outsiders, thinking they might be government employees or undercover police officers, so they don’t want to answer questions, and there could be a danger to interviewers or distributors. questions, as they may be threatened or attacked. Another drawback is that you can’t use a quota method if you don’t know the background of the people in the area to set the quotas. Another downside is that if people don’t want to take the time to take a survey on the go, very few will take a take-home survey and return the survey, so you’ll have a low response rate. An attempt to conduct an email quota survey has the disadvantage that not only may there be a low response rate, but certain types of people, such as low-income people, are less likely to use email. However, weighting is often used with these types of surveys to obtain a sample that more closely matches the percentage of the larger population.
4. The advantage of taking samples for a mail survey using regular mail is that it can be a large, completely random survey, since the mail generally reaches all members of the population. One downside, however, is that it can be expensive to mail a survey to a large group, especially since postage rates have increased. Another drawback is that there is typically a high non-response rate to mailed questionnaires, and those who do respond may be different from those who do respond. While the cost factor can be substantially reduced with an email survey, the downside of conducting an email survey is that those who have emails or those who are most likely to respond to emails may be different from the non-responding population. as well as the small population that does not have email, generally because they have lower income.