Training Educators to Design and Develop ODL Materials/Needs Analysis/CLUSTER SAMPLING

It is sometimes expensive to spread your sample across the population as a whole. For example, travel can become expensive if you are using interviewers to travel between people spread all over the country. To reduce costs you may choose a cluster sampling technique.

Cluster sampling divides the population into groups, or clusters. A number of clusters are selected randomly to represent the population, and then all units within selected clusters are included in the sample. No units from non-selected clusters are included in the sample. They are represented by those from selected clusters. This differs from stratified sampling, where some units are selected from each group.

Examples of clusters may be factories, schools and geographic areas such as electoral sub-divisions. The selected clusters are then used to represent the population.

Suppose an organisation wishes to find out which sports Year 11 students are participating in across Australia. It would be too costly and take too long to survey every student, or even some students from every school. Instead, 100 schools are randomly selected from all over Australia.

These schools are considered to be clusters. Then, every Year 11 student in these 100 schools is surveyed. In effect, students in the sample of 100 schools represent all Year 11 students in Australia.

Cluster sampling has several advantages: reduced costs, simplified field work and administration is more convenient. Instead of having a sample scattered over the entire coverage area, the sample is more localised in relatively few centres (clusters).

Cluster sampling’s disadvantage is that less accurate results are often obtained due to higher sampling error (see section Information - Problems with Using) than for simple random sampling with the same sample size. In the above example, you might expect to get more accurate estimates from randomly selecting students across all schools than from randomly selecting 100 schools and taking every student in those chosen.