Think about your college or university. Imagine that you want to draw a sample of students from your school that is representative of the entire population of all students at your school.
Discuss how you would get a sampling frame of all students at your school. What are some challenges you might face in constructing the sampling frame? How likely do you think it is that you could use simple random sampling to generate a representative sample of students?
Discuss a plan for drawing a stratified random sample of students. Consider the subgroups of interest in the population from which you would want to sample.
Discuss a plan for drawing a cluster sample of students from your school. What are some of the clusters that you might randomly sample before sampling students themselves?
Discuss how you would measure respondents’ income on a survey. What do you think are some of the challenges to collecting reliable and valid income data?
What are some topics addressed by the social sciences that you find interesting? For one or two of these topics, design research questions that ask about relationships between independent and dependent variables.
