Criminologists are studying a new program for rehabilitating criminals. The program will be considered successful if it results in fewer repeat offenses. Therefore, they decide to compare the number of repeat offenses committed by graduates of the new program with the number of repeat offenses committed by criminals who have not participated in the new program. They randomly select 40 graduates of the new program. To control for things like age and socioeconomic status, they carefully match each selected graduate with a nongraduate of the same age, socioeconomic status, and so forth. Is this an example of dependent sampling or independent sampling. Why?

Question 31 options:

a) Dependent sampling. The fact that a given graduate is chosen for one sample directly influences the choice of a nongraduate for the other sample.

b) Dependent sampling. Independent sampling does not require the sample sizes to be equal, but the criminologists' samples will have the same sample size.

c) Independent sampling. The population of criminals who have graduated from the new program is obviously different from the population of criminals who have not.

d) Independent sampling. The graduates are chosen randomly and therefore the selection of each one does not influence the selection of the others.