Chapter 12: Implementing your Sampling Strategy in an Educational Setting

This quote comes from the celebrated work of Western literature, Don Quixote. Aside from concisely expressing a statistical observation, the quote illustrates the long history of thought underlying sampling. It also reflects the quantitative tradition of sampling, specifically the now well-established principle that careful sampling can enable researchers to generalize their findings from the part to the whole (Lodico et al., 2006). In the field of survey research, effective sampling design is central to effective survey design. As Groves and colleagues (2009) caution in their treatise on survey methodology,

This cautionary passage is amplified in educational settings, where “multifaceted situational contexts and the inquiry’s evolving positioning as it progresses through the research process” (Collins, 2017, p. 2) introduce unique hurdles for conducting survey research. Overcoming these hurdles requires in-depth knowledge of not only the instrument-level considerations of survey research (e.g., psychometric issues), but also of how to implement a sampling strategy. To put it plainly, to conduct rigorous survey research there are concepts that must be known, such as the differences between a population and a sample, the principles of probability and nonprobability sampling procedures, and the foundational methodological work of sampling.