This Sample Size Calculator is presented as a public service of Creative Research Systems. You can use it to determine how many people you need to interview in order to get results that reflect the target population as precisely as needed. See help section below calculator.
Creative Research Systems was founded in 1982 to provide software for market researchers, political pollsters, human resource professionals, social scientists and others who use questionnaires. If you follow this link to their home page, you will also find a calculator that will determine the level of precision you have in an existing sample.
Before using the sample size calculator, there are two terms that you need to know:
Confidence Interval
The confidence interval is the plus-or-minus figure usually reported in newspaper or television opinion poll results. For example, if you use a confidence interval of 4 and 47% percent of your sample picks an answer you can be "sure" that if you had asked the question of the entire relevant population between 43% 47-4) and 51% (47+4) would have picked that answer.
Confidence Level
The confidence level tells you how sure you can be. It is expressed as a percentage and represents how often the true percentage of the population who would pick an answer lies within the confidence interval. The 95% confidence level means you can be 95% certain; the 99% confidence level means you can be 99% certain. Most researchers use the 95% confidence level.
When you put the confidence level and the confidence interval together, you can say that you are 95% sure that the true percentage of the population is between 43% and 51%.
The wider the confidence interval you are willing to accept, the more certain you can be that the whole population answers would be within that range. For example, if you asked a sample of 1000 people in a city which brand of cola they preferred, and 60% said Brand A, you can be very certain that between 40 and 80% of all the people in the city actually do prefer that brand, but you cannot be so sure that between 59 and 61% of the people in the city prefer the brand.
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Thursday, September 2, 2010