Strata

Stratified Sampling for Oversampling Small Sub-Populations

June 11th, 2012 by

by Ritu Narayan

Sampling is a critical issue in any research study design. Most of us have grappled with balancing costs, time and of course, statistical power when deciding our sampling strategies.

How do we know when to go for a simple random sample or to go for stratification or for clustering? Let’s talk about stratified sampling here and one research scenario when it is useful.

One Scenario for Stratified Sampling

Suppose you are studying minority groups and their behavior, say Yiddish speakers in the U.S. and their voting.  Yiddish speakers are a small subset of the US population, just .6%. (more…)