A sample is a smaller group of subjects drawn from the population in which a researcher has an interest (Kothari, 2004, p. 152). The use of a sample enabled me to achieve my research objectives using available resources. The purpose of sampling in this study was to make sure that every third year student had an equal opportunity to participate in the survey, and to ensure that an appropriate number of individuals was drawn from the various subsets of the population as directed by Babbie and Mouton (2001, p. 192). With the high number of students, I could not use all students, and so I stratified students into groups to ensure a greater degree of representativeness and decreasing sampling error. This involved two groups of students, i.e. SLs and SNLs. To start with I indicate how I sampled students who were not leaders, and then I will indicate how I identified student leaders as a special sub-sample.
Ideally, a probability sample would be drawn up by randomly selecting respondents from a list of all individuals of the target population. However, no such list was available to me and administering the questionnaire to a sample drawn in this manner would have been quite impossible (e.g. how to contact sampled individuals?). Hence a more elaborate multi-stage process of sampling was used.
The main sampling techniques used in this study were stratification and probability sampling. Stratification refers to the grouping of the target population into homogeneous groups before sampling (Babbie and Mouton, 2001, p. 647; Kothari, 2004, p. 16). In that case, students were stratified by year of study and faculty, so I decided to use undergraduate students who dominate the population of the university. These undergraduate students were then stratified again into year of study, and the sample was drawn mainly from third year students. It was decided to focus on students who had at least two years of exposure to higher education and university life i.e. that enough time would have passed for there to be reasonable evidence of the impact of higher education on the respondents’ political attitudes and involvement. First and second year students are not likely to have had enough exposure yet and are therefore excluded from the sampling frame. The same applies to the small group of students who make up the non-degree population and to postgraduate students, though postgraduates might be more experienced than undergraduates. Apart from these reasons, it is obvious that most
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politically active students in universities tend to be undergraduates, who also dominate all political positions of the student organization.
Secondly I used faculty as a stratification factor so as to have a sample that is representative from all fields of study within the university. As pointed by Altbach (1991, p. 252-253), student interest and participation in political activism varies by faculty. Thus, stratifying the sample by faculty ensured that the sample would be representative of students from different disciplinary backgrounds which may influence their political attitudes and behaviour. Furthermore, provided that the participation of different genders varies greatly between disciplines, the sample was also constructed with an eye on gender representation (i.e. ensuring that the distribution of gender by faculty would be similar to the enrollment ratio by gender in each faculty. This is further elaborated below (e.g. Table 4.1).
As a second step in the sampling procedure, third year courses/classes in each faculty were randomly sampled from the list of courses offered in these faculties. For the purpose of sampling I was provided with UDSM student statistics which comprised the number of students enrolled in each of the ten faculties (by gender distribution, and programs/courses/classes offered by the various faculties). One to three classes/courses (depending on the size of the faculties) were randomly selected from the list of third-year courses offered to meet the number of students needed to respond to questionnaires from the same faculty. Thus, each class/program which was sampled represented a sampling unit that contributed to the required sampling ratio. The minimum number of respondents in the survey was to be not less than three hundred (excluding student leaders who formed a subsample).
Student leaders, defined as students from the student organisation who represent other students in decision-making at faculty level and university level make up a special group which was sub-sampled. Apart from those SL who responded to the survey by means of their selection in the overall sample, most student leaders’ responses were obtained in a different way. Through the Office of Dean of Students, all members of student executives were invited to a special seminar (including USRC representatives, faculty and halls of residence leaders/representatives). These student leaders were to be accompanied by four student representatives from each faculty who are responsible to faculty-level decision-making bodies. It was to be four as I expected that each year of study from each faculty would have
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one representative in faculty decision-making bodies. All these student leaders were to attend a seminar prepared by me and the Dean of Students office, at which presentations were made about student politics, student representation and democracy. Presenters in that seminar included officers from Dean of Students Office and lecturers. At the end of the discussion, student leaders were introduced to the survey and asked to respond to the questionnaire.
During the process of data collection I decided to increase the sample size, to have more respondents, and therefore to reduce sampling error25 and to ensure that the intended minimum number of responses is obtained. Since the tool used has a very big number of questions, I realised that a number of students did not respond to all questions and left me with not enough questionnaires that were adequately responded to in full. Because of that, I took all questionnaires that had been responded above average (by more than a half) as valid responses. Therefore I did not use about sixty two (62 i.e. 13%) of returned questionnaires. Secondly, there were some students who did not want to be involved in the survey after they went through the participant information sheet. On the one hand, this showed that the classroom setting did not necessarily limit students’ ability to exercise their free choice of voluntary participation; on the other hand, it also reduced the number of respondents in the realised sample. And lastly, I opted for an increased sample size so as to have a large sample that will lead to a reduced sampling error compared to if I had ended up with a smaller and perhaps inadequate sample (see Babbie and Mouton, 2001, p. 191).