Case Study 3: A case study on the opinion of the households in relation to the environment protection policies enacted by the provincial and federal government

INTRODUCTION TO
STATISTICS
STUDENT ID:
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INTRODUCTION TO STATISTICS
The selected case study for the purposes of this task is Case Study 3 which outlines the
opinion of the households in relation to the environment protection policies enacted by the
provincial and Federal government.
a) The target population would consist of all those households which tend to lie in my town.
It makes sense to study a sample of the population as it would lead to lesser resources
being spent in terms of time and money. This is essential so that the results are available
on time while the accuracy is not compromised (Flick, 2015).
b) The suitable choice of sampling for the task at hand would be stratified random sampling.
This would ensure that the selected sample would be representative of the population of
the town. This is essential as the views of the people living in the town may depend on a
host of attributes such as their affiliation towards a particular party, gender, age, education,
culture and religion. Hence, considering the significant attributes for the research question,
it makes sense to ensure that that the key attributes are represented in roughly the same
ratio as the population. Further, the selected households would still remain random and
hence, the sample obtained would not be biased and at the same time reliable (Hillier,
2006). This is not possible with a random sample which can lead to disproportionate
representation of a particular group which may impact the reliability and validity of the
study conducted. Systematic sampling would also the same issue as simple random
sampling (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2015).
c) The various steps involved in the stratified random sampling are outlined below (Hair et.
al., 2015).
Step 1: The first step is to identify the attributes which may influence the opinion of the
people towards environmental policies. These may be age, religion, political affiliation
and other factors which need to be narrowed down based on available literature. The
available literature study can identify the critical parameters in the context of the study to
be conducted.
Step 2: It is essential to segregate the population of the town in accordance with the
attributes which have been identified above. Hence, taking religion, age, culture and other
attributes, segregation of the households may be done.