Question

students are conducting a survey about which teacher the students admire the most. The population is the 300 students in the fifth and sixth grades. What is the appropriate sample size for the population

Answer 1

I don't remember it from back when I last did stats, but shouldn't you have a formula for calculating an appropriate reprasentitive sample to gain x% confidence from a population of size y?

Answer 2

no

Answer 3

*representative. Jesus I'm tired.
Well there is a way to calculate it, and I'm pretty sure it's a straght-forward formula you can plug numbers into. Maybe do a quick Google search for "calculating representative sample size" or something similar.

Answer 4

I have found that sample sizes of 30 are usually sufficient, but maybe there is a formula and we could sample less than 30 students?

Answer 5

If I remember rightly meverett04, the sample size is proportionate to how high your confidence interval needs to be. Eg. you sample x of a population y to have your data accurate to a 96% confidence interval and so on.This may be going a bit beyond what the poster is asking, in which case I do apologise, it just sounded statistics-y to me.

Answer 6

fewscrewsmissing - you are right. Randomly picking sample size from population size without consideration for other factors won't work.

Answer 7

http://research-advisors.com/tools/SampleSize.htm

Answer 8

Look at the table. For a population of 300, you need a rather large sample size even for 95% confidence and +/- 5% margin of error. Eye opening.