Stratified Sampling - Disadvantages

Disadvantages

Stratified sampling is not useful when the population cannot be exhaustively partitioned into disjoint subgroups. It would be a misapplication of the technique to make subgroups' sample sizes proportional to the amount of data available from the subgroups, rather than scaling sample sizes to subgroup sizes (or to their variances, if known to vary significantly e.g. by means of an F Test). Data representing each subgroup are taken to be of equal importance if suspected variation among them warrants stratified sampling. If subgroups' variances differ significantly and the data need to be stratified by variance, then there is no way to make the subgroup sample sizes proportional (at the same time) to the subgroups' sizes within the total population. For an efficient way to partition sampling resources among groups that vary in their means, their variances, and their costs, see "optimum allocation".

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