You are serving students to find out their opinion on the quality of food served in the school cafeteria. You decide to pull only the students to buy hot lunch any particular day. Is your simple random? Explain.
No, this is not a simple random sample because the sample is not being selected completely at random. Only students who decide to buy hot lunch on a particular day are being included in the sample, which could be biased towards students who prefer hot lunch or have a higher opinion of the cafeteria food. Additionally, the sample size and characteristics may vary depending on which day the survey is conducted. A more unbiased approach would be to randomly select a sample of students from the entire student population who have purchased lunch at least once in the cafeteria within the past month.
No, pulling only the students who buy hot lunch on a particular day would not be an example of simple random sampling. Simple random sampling involves selecting individuals from a population in such a way that each individual has an equal chance of being selected. In this case, by only surveying the students who buy hot lunch, you would be excluding the students who bring their own lunch or buy lunch from outside sources, resulting in a biased sample. To achieve simple random sampling, you would need to randomly select students from the entire population of students, regardless of whether they buy hot lunch or not, to ensure equal representation and reduce bias.
No, this sampling method is not a simple random sample. A simple random sample is a method where each member of the population has an equal chance of being included in the sample, and every possible combination of individuals is equally likely to be selected.
In this scenario, you are specifically targeting students who buy hot lunch on a particular day. By selecting only the students who buy hot lunch, you are introducing bias into your sample, as you are not considering the opinions of students who bring their own lunch or opt for other lunch options. This bias could potentially affect the overall representation of the student population's opinion on the quality of the food served in the school cafeteria.
To conduct a simple random sample for this scenario, you would need to randomly select students from the entire student population, regardless of their lunch choices. You could use a random number generator or assign each student a number and use a random method (such as drawing names out of a hat) to select the specific individuals who will be included in the sample. This way, every student would have an equal chance of being selected and your sample would provide a more unbiased representation of the student body's opinions.