Population and Sampling / Data Sources

For studies involving human participants, the population and sampling section discusses the complete details of who are qualified to participate in the study and how they are selected in the study. The first subsection (population) should answer the following:

·      Who are the target participants?

·      What are the inclusion, exclusion and withdrawal criteria?

o   Include the basics such as age and sex, and then details specific to your study.

o   Justify the important criteria selected/deselected with cited literature.

·      What is your sampling frame (if available)?

The second subsection (sampling) should answer the following:

·      What is the sampling technique that you used in the study? Justify your choice with cited literature.

·      Where will you find your participants to recruit them?

·      What is your sample size? Present your computation and the disaggregation if available.

·      If the sample size is still indefinite as indicated by certain study designs (mostly qualitative designs) then explain how the sampling size will be eventually determined in the conduct of the study (ie. data saturation, theoretical saturation).

For studies that use/have multiple methods, multiple phases and triangulation, then each type of participant will have its own subsection wherein the details of sampling for each is explained. The same treatment will also be applied for studied utilizing multilevel sampling.

Guidelines for revising this section for the final manuscript:

1. Declare deviations from proposal (must have been approved by technical and ethical committee).
2. Declare actual number of sample size (successful recruits), and response rate, mortality/attrition rate and withdrawal rate.
3. For qualitative studies utilizing purposive sampling: give brief description of each participant (one short paragraph each).
4. For emergent designs (GT, action research, Delphi studies) sampling decisions that emerge in every step of collection and analysis must be reported and justified.
5. Do not forget to admit the weaknesses of your sampling plan and outcome in your limitations.

Note 1: The nomenclature of participants in the manuscript vary per type of study:

·      Subjects: for experimental, interventional and observational studies

·      Respondents: for survey research

·      Participants: can be used for other types of research

·      Informants: can be used for qualitative research utilizing interviews

·      Discussants: for studies utilizing focus group discussion

For studies who will make use of data not coming from human participants, this section is entitled, “data sources.” The presentation for each data source will also be explained like the population and sampling section for each data source.

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