GCSE Maths – Statistics
Sampling
Notes
WORKSHEET
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Sampling
When studying statistics, population and sampling are very important.
Population
A population is all the people, events or items which are of interest to be questioned,
surveyed, or experimented on.
Example populations include:
• All the fish in a pond.
• British storms from 1990-2010.
• GCSE students at a local school.
Using an entire population in a study has advantages and disadvantages:
• Advantage – everyone’s opinion is accounted for.
• Disadvantage – takes a long time and can be expensive.
Census
A census collects information from all members of a population.
A teacher wanted to find out which candidate her class of 25 students voted for in the
student elections. The teacher carries out a census by creating a simple questionnaire for
all 25 students to fill out and collected the results. The population is the 25 students in her
class.
Questionnaires
Questionnaires are used to collect responses from people in a population by asking
questions. They should be simple and easy to understand. The options need to be clear, and
account for all possibilities.
Example: Identify two problems with the question and rewrite it to improve the responses.
Sarah wants to find out how often people go for a run each week. She uses this question in a
questionnaire:
“How many times do you go for a run?”
Օ. Not very often Օ. Sometimes Օ. A lot
Identify two problems
There are no numerical values. One person’s definition of ‘a lot’ may be different to another’s.
There are insufficient options - for example, there is no option for someone who doesn’t run at all.
Improve the questionnaire
Add numerical values and add an option for people who don’t run at all:
How many times do you usually go for a run each week (of at least 1km in distance)?
Օ None Օ 1-3 Օ 4-5 Օ 6+
This questionnaire could be improved further. Sarah could repeat the survey over multiple weeks,
asking how many runs the participants had completed at the end of each week. She could then take
an average herself, rather than relying on the participants definition of ‘usually’.
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Sampling
Sampling involves selecting a smaller sub-group of people or objects from a population to
test a theory or idea (a hypothesis) about the population.
For example: a teacher wants to find out the average test score for the year 11 maths exam.
She can’t ask all 150 students, so she selects 50 of them and uses their average score to
reflect the population’s average score as a whole.
Using a sample in a study has advantages and disadvantages:
• Advantage – quicker to conduct and cost-effective.
• Disadvantage – smaller range of opinions and could cause bias.
Bias
A sample should represent everyone. Bias is when one person, group, or opinion is favoured
over the others.
If a teacher chose to take results from students in the top set only, her average result
wouldn’t be very representative of the whole school year. This sample would be biased
towards higher scores.
Example: Will the following sample produce a bias result?
10 people at a gardening centre were asked about the importance of home-grown vegetables.
People at a garden centre are more likely to feel that home grown vegetables are very important.
Therefore, the sample is biased.
Example: Identify three issues with the following sampling method used.
The town butcher wanted to estimate the number of people who buy meat from his store. He
telephoned 100 people one morning to ask:
‘Did you buy meat from the butchers or supermarket this week?’.
14 people chose the butchers. The butcher concludes that 14% of people in the town buy meat
from the butchers each week.
1. 100 people is not enough to represent a town. Towns can have 500-100,000 inhabitants. This is
not a large enough sample to represent the whole town.
2. People might have shopped at the butchers this week as a one-off. They might usually shop at
the supermarket. The survey should be repeated over multiple weeks to reduce the effect of one-
off shoppers.
3. People might have been shopping at the butchers when the call took place.
They would not have been included in the investigation.
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Sampling - Practice Questions
1. Asim wants to find out how much exercise people do. He asks the members of his
football club to complete a questionnaire.
a) This may not be a suitable sample. Explain why.
b) Suggest a better sampling method and describe how Asim should collect this
sample.
2. The local sports club wants to build a new hockey pitch. The council needs to get the
views of local people. Counsellor Washington suggests taking a sample of the local
sports teams.
a) Explain what is wrong with this sampling method.
b) Counsellor Taylor suggests taking a random sample of 200 people instead. Describe
how the council could take a simple random sample.
3. Bonnie wants to find out more about the people in her school. She writes a
questionnaire which contains the following questions:
“How much do your parents earn?”
O Less than £12,000
O £12,000-£30,000
O £30,000-£50,000
O More than £50,000
a) Why is this question not appropriate?
b) Is she using good response boxes? Explain your answer.
Worked solutions for the practice questions can be found amongst the worked solutions for the corresponding
worksheet file.
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