Choose your Target Group

Defining this group means you have to answer central questions regarding the focus and purpose of your survey: So be clear about your survey objectives! But sometimes, it is the other way round: The people you can possibly reach define what you CAN find out.

You want to ask women and your aim is to find out how many women in Z-city have undergone FGM? Then the women in Z-city are your target group. Or: You want to ask men in the villages Bor and Gor what they think about FGM. Then your target group are the men in Bor and Gor. Your target group could also be members of a religious sect, students or doctors.

In most cases you will not be able to ask all of them. So you have to select a sample which represents this target group.

You have decided that you want to find out what percentage of people in your city practice FGM? In this case, the people you ask should represent the inhabitants of the city in terms of age, education, class, religion and ethnicity. If you do this properly it is called a “random sample”.

It is the most preferable, if you want to make accurate statements about practices and opinions in the whole community or group. However, it can also be time consuming and in some case you may not be able to fetch up such a sample.

Maybe you only want to ask the people you can reach easily like friends and their friends. You could also ask people on the street or in a shopping mall or you have a nearby community center where you could talk to people. But your friends or “Women who go shopping on Monday in the Great Mall of Z-city” are probably not the target group you want – you can’t really publish a study with the outcome “50% of Dana’s friends have undergone FGM”.

Your friends are part of society, so asking them tells you something about society. The problem is: If you only ask them or the women shopping in a mall this will not represent society in terms of age, class and background.

Next

Continue and learn more about random sampling if you want to conduct a truely representative survey.

If you know you can’t do a representative survey you can skip this and read about convenient sampling first. You may have to go back to random sampling later to understand what to observe when making your convenient sample more representative.

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