Bias in Human Services Research
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1. (a) How can you avoid bias when selecting samples for human services research?
(b) Imagine that you are going to design a survey that will be administered to consumers/clients in your field (e.g., nursing home residents, youth mentors, single mothers).
-- How would you go about sampling from this population in order to generate meaningful data?
-- What might be some of the challenges in ending up with a representative sample?
2. List different measures of variability discussed in the readings and, using your professional field, provide an example to illustrate the concept. If you were a manager looking at these measures of variability around some aspect of employee productivity, what may they tell you about an individual's or team's performance?
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Solution Summary
Practical suggestions to avoid bias in selecting samples for human services research. Random sampling techniques and convenience sampling are briefly discussed.
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1.
(a) How can you avoid bias when selecting samples for human services research?
(b) Imagine that you are going to design a survey that will be administered to consumers/clients in your field (e.g., nursing home residents, youth mentors, single mothers).
-- How would you go about sampling from this population in order to generate meaningful data?
-- What might be some of the challenges in ending up with a representative sample?
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In human services researches which use a SAMPLE (instead of the total population) as sources of data, validity of findings is not conditioned by the Sample Size, but by the REPRESENTATIVENESS of the sample. "Representativeness" of the sample means that the information provided by the sample respondents validly and reliably represents the thoughts, opinions or feelings of the population that they represent. Careful care should therefore be observed in the selection of the sample units. Primary consideration is that, there should be no BIAS; that the selection should be free of the researcher's personal influence, otherwise, the sample is no longer representative of the population, hence, invalid findings.
There are various methods in sampling in order to avoid bias. The choice depends on the size of the population and the purpose or objective of the study. The most basic is the Simple Randomized Sampling technique. It is the most basic because other techniques (e.g. Multistage, scientific, stratified) may be variations from this technique depending on the size of the sample or size of the population. In Randomized sampling, every member of the population has a ...
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