Read the following scenario and answer the questions below.
Bob wants to research the average real-estate commission received by real-estate agents selling newly built homes in Texas. To do this, he has compiled a list of all of the real estate agents he can find that sell newly built homes. Using a combination of real-estate association memberships, phone book registries, and internet searches, he has found 1,500 such real estate agents. 100 sell newly built homes in rural areas, 800 sell homes in suburban areas, and 600 sell newly built homes in urban areas. Bob plans on distributing a survey to a sample of 150 agents. To ensure that he gets a good mix of responses, he will randomly select 50 of the rural agents, 50 of the suburban agents, and 50 of the urban agents and mail them a survey.
1. What is Bob’s target population in this study?
2. What is the term for Bob’s list of real-estate agents?
3. What issues might Bob encounter in using this list?
4. What kind of sampling strategy is Bob using in this study?
5. What groups are oversampled and what groups are under-sampled in this study?
6. Suppose that instead of compiling a list of real-estate agents, Bob just looked in phone books and surveyed the first 50 rural real-estate agents, the first 50 suburban real-estate agents, and the first 50 urban real-estate agents. What type of sampling strategy would this be?
7. What if Bob asked those real-estate agents to refer him to other real-estate agents – what kind of sampling strategy would Bob be employing then?
Identify the problems with the question below (be specific). Then rewrite the question to fix the identified issues. Assume that the target population for the question is the average American citizen.
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“Why are correctional officers breaking correctional officer regulations all of the time?”
