Hi everyone, I'm involved in a discussion with a colleague. He suggested a sample design for a finite-sized process that (to all intents and purposes) involves tossing a coin and examining the unit if the coin shows Heads.
I should emphasize that we're both approaching the problem from a design-based sampling theory point of view. So I have no argument about the appropriateness of the design as such. Can this design be called 'Simple Random Sampling'? My intuition suggests that it can not, because the sample size is a random variable, so the usual standard error equations for SRS will be inaccurate. But I can't find any citations to back me up. So maybe I'm wrong. My questions are: 1) does this design have a name, and 2) are the usual SRS formula for e.g. the standard error of the mean exactly accurate? Or are they defensibly accurate approximations? 3) can anyone suggest some citations that provide guidance either way? Thanks for any assistance! Andrew -- Andrew Robinson Program Manager, ACERA Department of Mathematics and Statistics Tel: +61-3-8344-6410 University of Melbourne, VIC 3010 Australia (prefer email) http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/~andrewpr Fax: +61-3-8344-4599 http://www.acera.unimelb.edu.au/ Forest Analytics with R (Springer, 2011) http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/FAwR/ Introduction to Scientific Programming and Simulation using R (CRC, 2009): http://www.ms.unimelb.edu.au/spuRs/ ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.