How to calculate population and sample size for your surveys

If you are coming up with a foolproof survey or learning more about your target market and your population as a whole, then there are two factors you need to take into account – the population and sample size. How many people are you trying to find out more information about? What is the sample size you should use to get an overall representation of the population without spending excess manpower and time on the entire population? 

By narrowing down the entire group to just a smaller subset, you can save money, time, effort, and resources – this way you can still get an accurate picture of the people that you want to study without using all of your hard-earned resources. But how can you calculate the population and sample size? Let’s find out more here! 

The step by step guide to calculating population and sample size

Coming up with your survey sample size and population is the most important process for carrying out a survey – if you get these numbers wrong, the entire survey will fail. A survey sample size that is too small may have outliers and cause your results to be skewed -a survey sample size that is too big can cause you to get an inaccurate picture of who you are trying to find out more about. Therefore, calculating the correct sample size per your overall population is key. Visit this site to learn more about how to estimate your population and survey sample size.

First off – what is the survey sample size? The sample size is basically a smaller group and a selection of those who would represent the total population as a whole. Instead of choosing just a specific group of people, such as only women who are over the age of 40, the sample size should be the group of people that are most like your entire population. Using the correct size of this sample is key for being able to carry out the proper research on your population – getting this wrong can lead to a lack of insights and a waste of money and time in your survey. 

So how big should you make your sample size? Typically, two factors can influence the size that you should choose: the margin of error and confidence level. The margin of error is how many derivations you will allow on your survey and still let the results be accepted. The confidence level is the frequency of how often the population falls within the margin of error lines – if you find that the population falls within a 3% margin of error 95 out of 100 times, this provides you with a 95% confidence level.

Taking these two numbers into account you can now calculate the sample size and population for your survey. You can use a chart and a sample size calculator to find out the appropriate size of your sample according to your population size, confidence level (with the most common being 95% and 99%), and the margin of error (with the most common being 5%,2.5%, and 1%). 

Conclusion

Choosing the correct sample size for your survey takes into account the margin of error and confidence level. Typically, you will find that including these two variables will help you come up with the perfect size of the sample so you can get an accurate picture of your entire population without having outliers that skew the results.