Sampling
INTRODUCTION
In practice, however, researchers do not take numerous samples to estimate the population mean. Your applied business research will likely consist of only one random sample from a known population. Since one goal of statistics is to draw conclusions from a subset of evidence,
How confident are you about your inference to the population? What sample size will you need for your study?
What size should a sample be to satisfy both practical and statistical significance?
Wuensch suggests that you resolve the following issues before deciding on a sample size:
• How much power is desired?
• What is the smallest effect size that would be important?
• What is the level of statistical significance?
• What is the test statistic?
• What is the standard deviation in the population of the outcome variable?
• What is the population correlation (only for correlated sample designs)?
