Sampling Methods - Assignment Example

Sampling Methods For a health based proposal such as the one the researcher is currently working on, the population shall be made up of respondents from a hospital setting where the researcher shall have access to both care givers and service users. In this case, the care givers shall be nurses whiles the service users shall be the patients who receive care from the selected hospital. For a hospital as a research population site, there are certainly going to be a very large number of respondents that the researcher cannot interact with straight away.

For this reason, a sampling method shall be instituted to select a hand-full of respondents. The sampling technique to be used shall be a purposive sampling technique. Generally, a purposive sampling technique is suitable for qualitative research as it offers the researcher the opportunity to select only a specified group of people whose description meet the variables set (Wolcott, 1994). Using a purposive sampling technique would ensure that the researcher does not interact with people whose presence may not be very meaningful to the research.

The purposive sampling method shall be use by using the hospital folder of patients in an identified ward to select the best group of patients who meet the variables that will be outlined for the study. Commonly, purposive sampling is criticized for not guaranteeing internal validity because the researcher shall have some levels of manipulation of the respondents and could adjust the selection process to suit the hypothesis set (Trochim, 2006). This shall however be addressed by ensuring that an empirical data analysis technique is used.

Ethical issues may also arise when respondents are forced to be part of the sample size once they are selected by researcher. This shall be addressed by ensuring that it is only respondents who express willingness to be part of the study shall be included.