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In your quest to find scientific studies to back up your articles, you most likely will come
However, you must be cautious when picking which quantitative studies to use and cite in your articles,
While it’s important to look at how many participants are included, it’s also important to
If you don’t, you might end up with a study that has incorrect results, therefore making
The research population is one of the most important things researchers consider when carrying out a scientific
Focusing on a group of people can tell a lot about them, and can explain certain behaviors
However, researchers can’t go and ask every single student if and why they binge drink
Here are the four ways this can be done in quantitative studies
This strategy collects participants in such a way that it most closely resembles the actual population
Of course, it’s not always possible for every study to do stratified sampling
It’s not easy to do when there is a large population, and it costs a lot
But generally, it is one of the best ways to create a representative sample
Dividing participants in strata happens based on different characteristics
When choosing strata to divide participants in, researchers usually focus on demographics such as sex, age, education
The larger the population, the more strata there likely will be
Each stratum will have a certain % of participants, and this number is usually based on the % of
These participants are then selected for each stratum using a random or systematic sampling strategy
This might happen by generating a list of people and randomly picking people from that list
This sampling strategy can include the whole population and offers an equal chance to every potential participant
As you might tell, this is not the best way to create a representative sample
Random sampling strategy can be useful when there is not a lot of time or resources to
In this way, random sampling is very useful when combined with a more structured approach to sampling
When compared, stratified sampling might be seen as the most representative strategy for sampling, and random sampling (
But, there are other methods in between that researchers might opt for
It might be seen as similar to random sampling, but there is a difference
The difference is that systematic sampling does so based on an interval
In random sampling, people are chosen at random from that list
In systematic sampling, every 10th (for example) person is chosen from that list
While in stratified sampling researchers determine the strata in which participants will be divided, in cluster sampling
In cluster sampling, researchers take a pre-existing group of people, such as people living in a certain
The people selected in cluster sampling might have very different characteristics from each other, while the people
So in cluster sampling, researchers select participants based on existing groups rather than predetermined groups/characteristics
This is often done when the population is scattered and it’s not practical to select a
This is what you want to look for in most cases when it comes to scientific papers
These are criteria that are used to select participants for a study
This might indicate that a stratified sampling strategy was used
So in case they don’t explain what sampling strategy was used, you can look at how
It’s not always easy to figure out which quantitative scientific study is representative enough to draw
If you don’t select the right ones (meaning the ones using proper methods that lead to
To select the right scientific articles, one thing you can look at is how representative the study
The questions mentioned above can help you discern whether a quantitative scientific study used this sampling method