Sampling

With all research that attempts to make generalisations about a community, it is impossible to administer the tool to each member of the community without vast amounts of time and effort. Therefore, we need to be able to select participants who will provide data which will form a good basis for generalising findings from.

To do this, we are looking for two things.

1. we need participants who are representative of the population that we want to find out about. We may not be wanting to know about the whole population. For example, we might only want to know about women in a particular age range. Thus we need to know in advance whose language we are assessing.
2. we need enough participants to smooth out any interference in the data from errors on our part or circumstances beyond our control (e.g. a participant who has been up all night arguing with her husband!). The number of participants we need will vary depending on the total population we want information about and how homogenous this population is. The more variety there is in a population, the more participants we will need to gather data from to generalise about the whole community.