Hello again everyone,
Thank you for returning to my blog, muchly appreciated. This is the last blog until after christmas which may provide you with incredible excitement if you are fellow student at Bangor, a TA or some random lost soul on the web trying to find Facebook, if you are the later, please feel free to move on, although i am going to try my very best to provide an interesting approach to the evaluation of convenience sampling using my good friends the Smurfs (I WISH).
so here we go ….
So firstly what is convince sampling?
Well its basically what it says on the tin, a convenient way of gathering participants for a research study. This means not worrying about the greater population and just gathering the people who are available to you for example your friends and neighbours, even your great aunt Mabel if you catch her on a good day. Convince sampling usually involves getting as many ‘convenient’ participants as possible to reduce results being a result chance.
Next, When do we use convenience sampling?
As for most thing when something can be done conveniently, it is usually not a great method, so we normally use alternative more complicated measures to get a job done. The same applies to convenience sampling as there are far more sophisticated measures with less flaws than convenience sampling (which we will come to later), and as a result convenience sampling is usually used when we dont have access to the wider population or we need to gather a sample quickly due to time constraints ect. Champion (2002).
Ok now to introduce the stars of this blog, who will hopefully aid the evaluation of Convenience sampling,
here are my favorite woodland creatures… the Smurfs
As u can see all the Smurphs look simular … they are all blue with white hats… however just like human beings the Smurphs all exhibit unique individual behaviour for example Brainy Smurf shows a higher IQ, Scardey Smurph shows higher levels of paranoia and Passive-Aggressive Smurph … Well the name says it all.
How does this relate to convenience sampling? Well, convenience sampling makes the assumption that the target populations is homogeneous, basically assuming that one person is significantly simular to another. Which the Smurfs and indeed human beings are not we are all unique creatures, this can cause major problems for example if we research wellbeing in the Smurfs who do not have career (e.g Briany and Papa Smurf) and are available in the day for research, therefore gathered from convenience sampling, we may get a different less representative result than if we have a sample including Smurfs with a career.
However sometimes research gathers appropriate research from convince sampling, SONA student participation here at Bangor requires convenience sampling and if we want to test students learning (Note: Sander, 2005) it is incredibly beneficial however if we are testing hypothesises for the general population, the results of students are once again not overly representative. Altmann (1974) argues that sampling are tools for increasing validity when a researcher believes it to be beneficial, or sacrifice validity for a larger sample. But is this sacrifice worth it?
Another major issue, acknowledged by Jeffrey Henning (a researcher in customer experience), is that convenience sampling can lead to a biased sample as it is easy for a researcher to gather participants that would be found in there own culture or social groups, for example if Handy Smurph were to generate a sample he would most likely gather participants from his social group being Clockwork Smurph and Clockwork Smurphette (his own robot creations), This sample would not be representative of a target population (the other Smurphs) as ‘friends’ often have different attributes and behaviours to people/ Smurfs in general (in this case they are robots …). (Watters, 1989: convenience sampling doesn’t generate ‘normal characteristics.)
Ok, to conclude and to move back away form the wonderful Smurphs, back to reality. Convenice sampling is good because it is quick, reliable, cheap and easy, however it is a bad sampling technique because its not representative, has major validity issues and can lead to research bias.
Thank you for reading, please comment let me know what i missed (I’ve left some for you), if you have any intresting point or just have somthing ‘smurfy to say’.
Have a wonderful Christmas and Happy Holidays!
screamingdominos 
Hey very good blog. Had a really unique view on everything and kept it very original with the smurfs. Must say very entertaining. Although I enjoyed the blog it needs more then just the example of the smurfs. If there was other modern samples that could of been used it would have given more to the blog and your discussen. Also some references to other research needs to be added. Its hard to take one persons opinion in these situations without other research and opinions to back it up. It is also evident that convience sampling is biased and therefore not a very reliabile method. So to apply it to the smurfs and other modern ways it stands for the argument of is it very reliable. Other wise good blog! 🙂
Smurtastic blog, my friend! I love your unique approaches to statistics, always making it amusing and interesting. I think that a further thought would be that, should one take the entire population of smurfs and studied them as a whole we would, even then, be faced with difficulties. Each smurf, while looking very similar to the others, represents a different quality or personality, meaning that viewing the entire group and attempting to draw any sort of conclusion might be difficult due to high levels of individual differences within the group. Such high variability, as we learnt from Gravetter and Wallnau, leads to high error values and a sample whose results cannot be used.
Great blog and very unique way of explaining convenience sampling, definitely make stats more interesting .
A further advantage of convenience sampling is to aid the collection of data in pilot studies, convenience sampling is often used to obtain basic data in order to find trends in the data and to test the experiment/study before conducting the real research stud. Convenience sampling provides a quicker and easier way of gaining participants to do this.
Another disadvantage of convenience sampling is as you mentioned the sample isn’t representative of the population, this leads us to the other disadvantage that findings aren’t generalisable to the entire population and inferences cannot be made therefore there is not much point in the study being conducted in the first place if findings cannot be applied to the general population.
I am presuming it is Smurphs and not Smurfs due to copyright, if so what a bitch lol. In more serious terms, very good blog with a nice blog , I would just say that convenience sampling does produce a high amount of variability which is good for external validity but where it does fall down is that it does attract a particular type of participants particuarly participants that will try and guess the meaning of the test and do what they believe the test is trying to find.
Merry Christmass xx
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