A personnel director at a large company studied the eating habits of employees by watching the movements of a selected group of employees at lunchtime. The purpose of the study was to determine the proportion of employees who buy lunch in the cafeteria, bring their own lunches, or go out to lunch.

If the director includes only the employees in one department in her study, she is performing:

a. simple random sample

b. quota sample

c. convenience sample

d. multi-stage sample

e. census

The simple random sampling includes the selection of employees from different departments that would tend to represent the entire population.

Quota sampling is similar to stratified sampling in the first step, that is, putting the items homogeneous in nature in one group in such a way there is heterogeneity between the groups. After this, in quota sampling, the sampling is done by selecting a specific proportion of certain objects.

Convenience Sampling is the kind of sampling wherein the samples that are easily available for the researcher are selected.

Multi-stage sampling is the one wherein samples are selected in two stages. First of all, the groupings are made based on the homogeneity of the samples based on some specific factors. After this, a few samples are randomly selected from some of the formed groups. This accounts for multi-stage sampling.

Census is the term used for the complete population itself.

Thus, the sample used by the director that includes only the employees in one department in her study is convenience sampling.

Option C. is correct.