Sampling Procedure and the Actual Sampling

Sampling procedure and the actual sampling
The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between autonomy and the
performance of foreign companies in Singapore. As such, the target population will be foreign
companies in Singapore. According to Formal and Wojtera (2013), there are over 100 new
foreign companies registered in Singapore every year. An article by the department of statistics
Singapore indicates that in 2016 there were 180 newly registered foreign companies (Singstat,
2016). Therefore, for research purposes of this project, a sample size of 200 will be sufficient to
represent the whole population since it will be able to reflect variation of the foreign companies
in Singapore that are currently registered.
A simple random sampling procedure is used due to the nature of the research i.e. the target
population is not too large. In the selection of sampling units to be included in the sample data, a
method of random number table is adopted to ensure that companies included are chosen
completely by chance.
To collect data from the 200 companies, company executives who are the respondents of this
research were asked to fill a set of 7 questions from a questionnaire, making a total of 1400
responses.
From
table 1, in order to
ensure that the
1: Respondent's Gender Distribution
Valid Frequency Percent
Female 78 41.49
Male 111 58..51
Total 188 100

sampling frame is sufficient for analysis, it is ensured that, the sampling units are in a logical
manner and are indexed, the sampling units can be easily found given sufficient description since
the details of the companies involved in the study are given. In addition, the sampling frame was
prepared after analyzing the sample data of ambiguous responses, scanning for outliers through
test of normality. Hence, the final sample data contains 1316 responses from the 188 respondents
who were involved in the research.
Research Limitations
The nature of this research demands primary data however, the research process has been with a
share of limitations. The limitations include geographical restraints, lack of flexibility among
respondents, non-responsiveness, and time
One of the limitations is geographical restraints. Most of the companies in Singapore are spread
throughout the country and given the size of the country; it is not easy to be able to travel to each
sample unit in order to collect data to be used in analysis. Use of sample data non-representative
of the population of interest will lead to wrong inferences and conclusion. Therefore, in order to
validate the research results further research using a different sampling frame should be
conducted from which data from different companies not involved in the initial research is
collected, such may be through use of more surveys and varying the sample sizes.
Another limitation is the lack of flexibility among respondents. Most of the research respondents
are company executives, who generally are limited of time hence being able to get them respond
to the questionnaires proves to be kind of difficult, a factor which might lead to non-
responsiveness and hence affect the sample data which might probably introduce bias during
analysis.