Describe sampling theory and provide 2 examples to illustrate your definition. Discuss generalizability as it applies to nursing research.

 

Sampling theory refers to the field of statistics which tends to be involved with the collection, analysis and interpretation of data which has been gathered from random samples of a population under a certain study. The application of sampling theory is basically concerned with the proper selection of observations from the population that happen to constitute the random sample and also the use of probability theory is involved along with prior knowledge concerning the population parameters so as to analyze the data from the random sample and make conclusions from the analysis.  Normal distribution tends to be heavily used along with the related probability distributions so as to come up with the theoretical background for the sampling theory. Sampling theory tends to involve the basic concept of sampling a random sample from a population which is random where by each and every person from the population happens to have an equal chance of appearing in the sample.

EXAMPLE 1

The whiting which was landed by one ship at Beverly will always tend to have a smooth unimodal length composition whereby the mode will always tend to be 28 and 30 cm but occasionally once in 30 times and as high as 35 cm. A random single sample of whiting from one of the ship is taken occasionally(once in 30 times on average)given a mode which is at or above 35 cm but around 28 to 30 cm. A scientist who is relying on one sample tends to obtain a mode of 35 cm which is a departure from the average 29 cm doesn't indicate non randomness since misfortune may occur once in 30 times. Answer will be to take more samples, all 3 samples will tend to have modes which are over 35cm only once in 27,000 times.

Example 2.

We want to estimate the total number of children within an area for a particular disease spread, the researcher has to visit each and every house so as to recognize the children and do the act of allocating random numbers to them, the random number being allocated can be 0 and 1 and later select the highest number of children in one family so as to make a conclusion about their barriers and possibility about issues after doing the analysis from where the data will be analysed sing different statistical software's.

Generalizability.

Generalizability to a population tends to involve the application of results from a study sample to the larger population from where the sample was selected. For instance what percentage of people in the community would support the elections? In this scenario the researcher would be required to survey the people who will represent the population at large. Hence one must ensure that the respondents will include the relevant groups from the larger population, the relevant groups may be based on gender, race and age.