DETERMINING MINIMUM SURVEY SAMPLE SIZE FOR MULTI-CELL CASE

Abstract

Survey analysis method is widely used in many areas such as social study, marketing research, economics, public health, clinical trials and transportation data analysis. Minimum sample size determination is always needed before a survey is conducted to avoid huge cost. Some statistical methods can be found from the literature for finding the minimum required sample size. This paper proposes a method for finding the minimum total sample size needed for the survey when the population is divided into cells. The proposed method can be used for both the infinite population case and the finite population case. A computer program is needed to realize the sample size calculation. The computer program the authors used is SAS/IML, which is a special integrated matrix language (IML) procedure of the Statistical Analysis System (SAS) software.