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Statistics vocabulary · Sampling

Convenience sample

Meaning in statistics, with examples

nounCommon term

In statistics, convenience sample means: A sample made up of people who are easy to reach, such as students in the researcher's own class or visitors to a website, rather than people chosen at random.

In Turkish: kolayda örneklem, uygun örneklem

How it is used

Common in student projects and early-stage work because it is cheap and fast, but the results cannot safely be generalised to a wider population. Limitations sections usually say so openly: 'the study used a convenience sample of…'. Related non-random methods are snowball and quota sampling.

Example sentences

  1. Because we used a convenience sample of university students, the findings may not apply to older adults.

  2. A convenience sample is fine for testing the questionnaire, but not for estimating national figures.

Common collocations

  • convenience sampling
  • non-probability sample
  • snowball sampling
  • quota sample
  • random sampleA sample chosen so that every member of the population has a known, usually equal, chance of being selected, which helps avoid systematic bias.
  • sampleA smaller group selected from a population and actually studied, so that conclusions about the whole population can be drawn from it.
  • biasA systematic error that pushes results in one direction, so that estimates are consistently too high or too low rather than just randomly off.
  • stratified samplingA sampling method in which the population is first divided into subgroups (strata), such as regions or age groups, and a random sample is then taken from each one.
  • pilot studyA small trial run of a study, carried out before the main study, to test the questionnaire, the procedures and the timing and to find problems early.

More terms: Sampling

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