Sampling Methods in Psychological Research

March 9, 2025 – Paper 2 Psychology in Context | Research Methods

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In Psychology, a sampling method is the way in which the researcher obtains the participants who will take part in their research. A sample is always drawn from the researcher’s ‘target population.’ When preparing for your exam, it is important that you are able to accurately define the terms ‘target population’ and ‘sampling’.

In any study the target population is the group of individuals a researcher is interested in, for example, ‘babies in the Western world’, ‘people in the UK’, or ‘young people living in Bristol.’ At the end of the study, the researcher wants to make a statement about this population of people. This researcher obviously cannot study all the people in the target population (there are too many people in the target population). Instead, the researcher selects a smaller group called the sample.

Ideally, this sample will be representative of the whole target population so that generalisations about the population can be made. There are a number of sampling methods that researchers use in order to obtain a sample from the target population. It is important that these samples are representative of the target population, take a look at the strengths and weaknesses of each sampling method to assess whether or not the method would produce a representative sample.