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Homework answers / question archive / A phone company obtains an alphabetical list of names of homeowners in a city
A phone company obtains an alphabetical list of names of homeowners in a city. They select every 25th person from the list until a sample of 100 is obtained. They then call these 100 people to advertise their services.
Does this sampling plan result in a random sample?
What type of sample is it? Explain.
In this situation, the company decided to use only a list of homeowners to be their population. This is fine since only homeowners would be looking for land-line phone service. One could argue that people that rent are not included in this list; either way, each residence (house) is represented on the master list that being used by the phone company.
It should be that every possible entry on this list could be chosen to be a part of the sample. However, when they decided to pick every 25th name, they disqualified this method as being "random." For instance, once the first name is picked, every other name for our sample is already determined. It's every 25th name. This means that anyone in between those selections have no chance of being part of the sample. A true random sample would have it that any combination of 100 houses could be picked.
Choosing every 25th name is an example of a systematic sample.
