Simple random sampling in SPSS

Random sampling is used during quantitative research data collection. It is called random because every item or sample in the populations has an equal chance of being selected. Each sample is given unique ID.

Let us take an example to do simple random sampling in SPSS. Suppose we want to randomly select 10 letter from the 26 Alphabet letters

Population = [A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z]

We first do data entry into the SPSS as shown below. Make the variable type as string to enter string data. You need to assign unique ID to each value in your data. SPSS will randomly sample the data based on the ID, which could be generated randomly in SPSS transform > compute value > uniform random number

To do the simple random sampling go to data > select cases

Since we want to randomly select 10 letters out of 26, we need 10 / 26 = 38% of cases selected

After clicking ok in the dialog above, the following approximated random is obtained. Notice that is randomly select 13 cases instead of 10. Again this is just approximation.

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