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Opportunity sampling
Opportunity sampling is the Sampling technique most used by psychology students. It consists of taking the sample from people who are available at the time the study is carried out and fit the criteria your are looking for.
This may simple consist of choosing the first 20 students in your college canteen to fill in your questionnaire.
It is a popular sampling technique as it is easy in terms of time and therefore money. For example the researcher may use friends, family or colleagues. It can also be seen as adequate when investigating processes which are thought to work in similar ways for most individuals such as Memory processes. Sometimes, particularly with natural experiments Opportunity sampling has to be used as the researcher has no control over who is studied.
However, there are many weaknesses of opportunity sampling. Opportunity sampling can produce a biased sample as it is easy for the researcher to choose people from their own social and cultural group. This sample would therefore not be representative of your target Population as you friends may have different qualities to people in general.
A further problem with opportunity sampling is that participants may decline to take part and your sampling technique may turn into a self selected sample.
