You are looking to study the purchasing habits of college students around the co

Question

You are looking to study the purchasing habits of college students around the country and there is a list of all college-attending individuals collected by the Higher Education Research Institute with information on where they attend university, their age, majors, whether they commute or live on campus, their year in school, and desired career path.

(a) Discuss the fit of the sampling frame for your study.

(b) What do you think would be a good sampling plan?

(c) How would you use this list, and the information provided within it, to collect a sample for your study? Note any assumptions you need to make for your plan to work.

Explanation / Answer

We are looking to study the purchasing habits of college students around the country and there is a list of all college-attending individuals collected by the Higher Education Research Institute with information on where they attend university, their age, majors, whether they commute or live on campus, their year in school, and desired career path

a. A sampling frame is the source material or device from which a sample is drawn. It is a list of all those within a population who can be sampled, and may include individuals, households or institutions. Now purchasing habits do depend a lot on many factors like age,place they live, income status, desired career path. Hence the fit of the sampling frame is very good asit will aid us in doing future analysis and deriveing insights from the data available on the purchasing habits of the students

b.  Sampling plans should be designed in such a way that the resulting data will contain a representative sample of the parameters of interest and allow for all questions, as stated in the goals, to be answered. A good sampling plan is one that will reliably produce a repeatable, reproducible study. Hence a good sampling plan would be to conduct stratified random sampling, which is actually random sampling within different socio-economic strata of students within the data available to assess their purchasing habits

c. As stated earlier, we would use this list to segregate the students into different socio economic strata, based on age, where they live, desired career path etc. and then perform a straified random sampling from each strata or cluster to see how the purchasing habits follow a trend and how similar or different they are to each other. This will give us a direct insight into how these factors, on the basis of which the data is collected, influence purchasing behaviour

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