Research and development is a critical element for sociologists as they attempt to make meaning of various phenomena and establish reality regarding ways individuals behave in social situations. Conducting surveys thereby demands to target a specific population (the focus of a study) to determine how they think or feel towards a given social ideology. Marshall & Jones - Citizen Participation in Natural Resource Management uses random and stratified sampling to determine the transforming role of citizen participation regarding natural resource management.
Sampling entails acquiring a sample from the focus of a study who then participates in determining a given social ideology. The article depicts the use of random and stratified sampling methods in conducting its research. The first entails randomly selecting individuals from the target population depicting an equal chance for selection. The first survey uses the approach for the first sample using telephone interviews from the targeted population of the residents in the NRW (Marshall & Jones, 2005). The second sampling method the research uses involves stratified sampling, where the population is divided characteristically into groups. The survey draws the second sample from a database from participants “who filled out the Norris Lake Watershed Survey” (Marshall & Jones, 2005). It also adopts a telephone interview as the technique (the Computer-Aided Interviewing System). The two are implicitly similar, given the technique utilized and obtaining the target population. However, they differ with the former capturing a low response rate to the latter, that is, 44.4% against 66.5% (Marshall & Jones, 2005). The former entails a sample error while the latter does not (Marshall & Jones, 2005).
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The research in Marshall & Jones - Citizen Participation in Natural Resource Management uses random and stratified sampling. The two depict similarity in the use of one technique to conduct the survey, whereas they show inherent differences regarding response rate and sample error. The two extend the debate on selecting the best sampling method that can select participants who sufficiently represent a population warranting the success of a study.
References
Marshall, B. K., & Jones, R. E. (2005). Citizen participation in natural resource management: does representativeness matter? Sociological Spectrum , 25 (6), 715-737.
