Home › Forums › Methodspace discussion › Basic Question on ‘Sampling Bias’
- This topic has 5 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 7 years, 12 months ago by
Ingo Rohlfing.
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15th January 2013 at 6:36 pm #1811
Dhruba Lahiri
ParticipantWould welcome comments on the following problem
Suppose I ask a population of 2090 enterprises to choose between two different questions
Q1: A business should always strive for growth, profitability and innovation
OR
Q2: A business is about independence, acheiving personal satisfaction and enjoying your work and lifestyle
Now out of a total response of 165 , 70 of them chose Q1 and another 95 chose Q2. For the purposes of subsequent analysis if I deliberately decided to rerstrict my analysis only to those who chose Q1 ( i.e the 70) and named them EO, would this constitute a case of sampling bias?
17th January 2013 at 7:57 pm #1816Ingo Rohlfing
MemberThis cannot be decided on the basis of the information that you provide. A sampling bias would be in place when the reason why some companies opt for Q1 is systematically related to your research question and hypothesis. So, what is your hypothesis?
19th January 2013 at 4:58 pm #1815Dhruba Lahiri
ParticipantThanks Ingo
The central hypothesis is that EO attributes (innovativeness, proactive and risk taking) and Absorptive Capacity (ACAP) together can explain a large part of the performance (measured in terms of potential value) of the firm.
Look forward to your thoughts
24th January 2013 at 12:01 pm #1814Ingo Rohlfing
MemberWell, that’s not my field of research and, as I said, the informal assessment of potential selection bias is one of substantive and theoretical reasoning. But I would say you do not have a problem because the independent variables should not be systematically related to one of the two types of businesses (e.g. risk taking should describe Q1 and Q2 businesses alike).
24th January 2013 at 12:44 pm #1813Dhruba Lahiri
ParticipantThanks Ingo
Your answer seems to substantiate my understanding on this matter.
Based on your earlier reply I delved into the matter a little bit more. As I understood based on readings there will be sampling bias if the dependent variable DV (in this case performance measured as potential Value) has different distribution between the two groups (Q1 Vs Q2). To investigate this I compared the means after splitting the file using an independent T-test and the results were non significant (p>0.05). Could this be an additional basis to argue that there is no sampling bias in choosing just the group who answered Q1 for my subsequent analysis?
Your insight would be highly helpful
24th January 2013 at 1:09 pm #1812Ingo Rohlfing
MemberYes, that’s useful auxiliary information in this context.
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