Can You Explain The Disadvantages Of Convenience Sampling?

Convenience sampling is where a study is conducted using a sample of people that are convenient to get together. This is an alternative to getting a sample of people that will cut across the demographic and make the study more representative of the general population. This is also referred to as non probability sampling.

When a study is conducted in a more representative way, there are less arguments to claim that the study could be inaccurate and bias. Most scientists choose to make their study or testing group as representative as possible.

• Disadvantages
  

The issues with convenience sampling are generally negative and focus on the lack of representative people within the study. It is seen by scientists as biased sampling. Also, there is no guarantee that the study group you have will hold a mix of views and opinions; this is perhaps more likely if you chose a group that was representative of the population.

Furthermore, you will not have an even mix of different ages and sexes to bring more diversity to the group. If you choose to create snowball sampling from this convenience sample, you are less likely to get a snowball sample that cuts across the demographic and it may produce much of the same results.

• Improving convenience sampling
  

One thing that can be looked into when convenience sampling is whether you can put any controls in place to make the sample a little fairer. Maybe by using an equal number of each sex or other similar variables. This will not make the sample wholly representative but it will help by putting some of the controls in place so that there are a few lass variables in the sample.

• Advantages
  

Although there are quite a lot of disadvantages that come along with convenience sampling, there are also a lot of advantages, like the ability to arrange the sample of people quickly and easily - this is particularly useful in pilot testing.

Convenience Sampling is a process that is dependent on the convenience of the researcher. No attempt or limited attempt is being made by the researcher in this approach to get an accurate representation of the population. Its disadvantages are as follows:
- The sample is not an accurate representation of the population
- The findings from this sample are less definitive
- Results have to be extrapolated in order to fine tune them.
- It is completely unstructured approach.