BUSI 600
Dr. Michael Walker
Case Assignment #2
Jaime Arze
9/15/14

3. Describe the sampling plan. Analyze its strengths and weaknesses. Just about every research sampling plan can be associated with a variety of strengths and weaknesses. These are challenges the decision maker in charge of the study must face when choosing the sampling plan for the specific research. Penton media devised a sampling plan that would require several steps, in order to isolate an ideal population of users to poll for their research. Their lengthy process included a multi-step system that began with a phone questionnaire; the second stage consisted of “pretest”, which was mailed to a smaller group of individuals pulled …show more content…

It is then important to remember that in order to ensure final sample is a proper representation of the population, the subjects must have an unbiased chance of selection (Gigerenzer, 2004). It is clearly understood that it was Penton media goal to only include the decision makers of organizations in an effort to isolate the people who would be in charge of the advertisement publications as part of their study. However, most companies subdivide work differently and delegate certain tasks in different ways. By including only the decision makers in their study, Penton media may have actually excluded many of those employees in companies, who may be directly assigned to handle such tasks, or may be in charge of monitoring these publications without necessarily holding a managerial, or decision-making position for their organization.
4- Describe the research design. Analyze its strengths and weaknesses. Penton does a good at incorporating the necessary study types that would best aid their research design. Among the objectives initially set by Penton media was to identify a control for the sampling group. This was necessary so that they could observe the purchasing behavior of the sample. In order to obtain this sampling group the research design had to include a correlation type design (Cooper & Schindler, 2014). Further more, Penton media also used a meta-analytic study type. The reasoning