A researcher wants to study how people cope with the stress of being homeless.

Her goal is to make inferences about the total homeless population in the city from one probability sample. She decides to devise her sampling frame by asking all of the homeless shelters in the city for lists of the people who stayed at their shelter for at least one night during the last thirty days. She plans to draw a random sample from the list of residents. It is the beginning of the summer, and the researcher wants to finish collecting data by the end of the summer.

a. What is the researcher’s sampling strategy?

b. Do you think that this sampling frame will yield a sample that is representative of the city’s entire homeless population? Explain your answer.

c. Does collecting data over the summer months present any threats to the generalizability of the data? Explain your answer.