Perhaps the person collecting the data is a student learning about how to
design measurement instruments, or piloting a measurement instrument. It's
hard to learn how to do this, or to test it, without doing it, and going to
the effort and expense of getting a random sample to find that the
questionnaire was flawed would be a waste of time and resources. Might as
well try it out on a group that's easy to get hold of, and iron out the
flaws that way. I encourage my students to use their Facebook friends as
samples, because you can tell them that designing surveys is hard until
you're blue in the face - they never really get that it's hard until they
do it, and then try to analyze their results.
Jeremy
On 18 April 2014 11:18, Dennis Roberts <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Personally, seems like this is a perfect list to raise issues about
> methodology .... done in a civil way of course.
>
> My original post dealt NOT with random samples ... but more specifically
> ... what is the population of interest of the researcher making the
> "volunteer" request and, whether this online request for volunteers is the
> way to go about obtaining that sample from the target population of
> interest.
>
>
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