For professional researchers, properly documenting your sampling plan is critical to ensuring a high-quality market research process.
What is sampling and why is it important?
If you are new to the term, sampling is about deciding who is going to participate in your research and how you will ensure that they truly represent your population of interest.
It is essential to determine your population of interest for your research. The population of interest might include current customers, prospective customers, competitors’ customers, employees, or other groups—all depending on the specific project’s objectives.
Sampling is a classic example of the saying, “garbage in, garbage out.” If you don’t gather data from the right population, then your research results will be meaningless. For an obvious example, if you are doing a study to inform product roadmap planning, you don’t want to survey people who would never buy the product. That would be a sampling problem.
What types of market research projects involve sampling?
What types of market research projects involve sampling? The answer might surprise you.
All of them!
Whether you are conducting surveys, focus groups, in-depth interviews (phone or webcam), online communities, ethnographic research, or any other kind of primary research, you are going to be making decisions about sampling.
Sampling decisions can be complex, and some projects are going to have more rigorous sampling plans than others. However, all studies require decisions about who is going to participate.
Is documenting your sampling decisions really necessary?
Documenting your sampling decisions might seem like an extra step, but it is an important part of the process. Documentation is critical because you are likely going to collaborate with other people who are going to ask questions (or worse, make assumptions).
Documentation is especially handy when you have market research results that are controversial or unexpected. The first thing that the research sponsor/client is going to do is question the validity of the research. If the results are “bad news”, they’ll likely say you did the research with the “wrong” population.
To avoid any misunderstandings, you want to be able to state and demonstrate that you’ve completed the research with the correct population. While the population’s views might not be expected or ideal, careful sampling decisions (and correct data analysis) will ensure that your results reflect reality.
What should you include in your sampling plan documentation?
So now you’re ready to document your sampling plan, but what does that involve? What you document can vary depending on the project requirements, but a good plan will include at least the following:
- What methodology the sampling is for (is this for survey research, ethnography, focus groups, in-depth interviews, etc.)
- How research participants (sample) are selected from the population of interest (target market). This typically involves specifying the variables and counts/ratios that will be used in screeners and quotas, such as gender quotas.
- How the sample is obtained (the “frame” or “source”). You may use a company or multiple sources for this.
- What incentives or response rate boosters are used, if applicable. In some industries, compensation is very common but in others, it is unethical or banned, so it is important to document this.
- What is known about the expected sample quality and known limitations.
- How many participants total will be included, written as “n=x”.
- What the expected margin of error is for the data.
Current Research Rockstar students: you have related templates in both the Market Research 101 and Sampling Methods for Market Research courses.
To learn more about this and other market research topics, check out our Research Rockstar eLearning course, “Sampling Methods for Market Research”.
And don’t miss our video podcast series, Conversations for Research Rockstars, with new episodes each week. Be sure to see our video podcast episode on today’s topic, Essential Market Research Tips: Documenting Your Sampling Plan. Subscribe and share this video series on YouTube or listen to the audio-only version on Apple Podcasts so you never miss an episode!
