Question

Ruth is studying characteristics of popular American songs from 1900 to 1945. Ruth gets a list of 500 songs from this era. Ruth wants to select 30 songs to include in her sample. Which of these methods will result in a random sample? Please answer, I need the answer quick!

Answer 1

Ruth wants to select 30 songs out of 500 total songs for a sample, this means that we want to have a random selection of the 30 songs out of the 500 (in this way we avoid to have a biased sample)

The options are not given, but an example of a method that will result in a random sample may be assigning to each one of the 500 songs a number between 1 and 500. And for each one of those numbers, Ruth may write the number in a piece of paper, then put the 500 papers in a bag, and selecting 30 pieces of paper at random from the bag. The 30 numbers selected will be the 30 songs of the sample.

So you need to have a method where each song has the same probability, 1/500, of being selected.