Understanding Nursing Research

I really appreciate the way you listed the steps in selecting random samples. I did not come across any steps or rules to obtain a simple random sample. The lottery is a form of simple sampling. It does not use any method to select numbers other than the population number set. Consecutive numbers can be drawn or number far apart from each other. I would like to know more about the difference between the type of random sampling used in lottery draws versus the sampling method steps you described. The only type of selection process in the text book definition states simple random sampling uses selection of elements from the selection frame (Burns, 2011).
References
Burns, N., Grove, S. K., & Gray, J. (2011). Understanding nursing research: …show more content…
National restaurant chains test new menu items in this way. When I lived in Ohio, it was a big test market area. Supposedly the population of Ohio was thought to be representative of Midwestern people. Area restaurants such as McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Domino’s introduced new menu items in this area to survey their popularity. I do not know what type of demographic data was used to determine that Ohio residents were representative of the Midwestern population. It was nice to get to try the new menu items before the rest of the country. The first McDonald’s salads and Domino’s try at breakfast pizzas were yummy. The Taco Bell french fries didn’t make it. This was a good example of being part of a large cluster sampling process without ever knowing …show more content…
I am not sure the term census is a type of random sampling. Census is usually a method of attempting to collect date from an entire population (Rumsey, 2011). If you are attempting to collect data from the entire population, it is not a sample. Data collected from a census is then summarized and used a parameter. The reports written from this data are given as estimates not statistics. Also usually the estimates are adjusted for missing data. The census is a good tool to collect data, but I don’t think it is a way to perform random sampling.
References
Rumsey, D. J. (2011). Statistics for dummies. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley.

Exercise 18
Q1. Assuming that the distribution is normal for weight relative to the ideal and 99% of the male participants scored between ( - 53.68, 64.64),where did 95% of the values for weight relative to the ideal lie? Round your answer to two decimal places.
Answer: Mean of weight relative to ideal x̄ ¿
¿
= 5.48 and Standard Deviation (σ) = 22.93.
Calculation: (x bar)