ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide the consumer of research, with an overall understanding about the importance of and the thinking that goes on when choosing a sample. It provides some initial definitions of terminology, which are essential for understanding the rest of the discussion. These definitions are followed by two segments that discuss the two major sampling paradigms found in research in applied linguistics. The choice of paradigm is guided by the research question being asked by the researchers. In other studies, the cases might be inanimate objects from which researchers extract their data. Typically, having access to the entire target population to which researchers want to generalize their findings is impossible. Whatever is available for use becomes the experimentally accessible population. It is to this population the findings of a study can be directly generalized, not to the entire target population. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ethics of using human participants in a research study.
