Reaffirmed 2022

NATIONAL FOREWORD

This Indian Standard (Part 4) which is identical with ISO 3534-4 : 2013 ‘Statistics - Vocabulary and symbols - Part 4: Survey sampling’ issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) was adopted by the Bureau of Indian Standards on the recommendation of the Statistical Methods for Quality and Reliability Sectional Committee and approval of the Management and Systems Division Council.

This standard is one of the series of Indian Standards on ‘Statistics - Vocabulary and symbols’. Others standards in this series are:

Part 1 General statistical terms and terms used in probability (third revision)

Part 2 Applied statistics (third revision)

Part 3 Design of experiments (third revision)

Survey sampling is essentially a strategy of planning for the collection of information on a population. In cases where all entities in the population can be listed, statistical methodologies of sampling without replacement play a key role. The design of a survey and its implementation depends on the type of questions to be addressed, the degree of generality to be attached to the conclusions, and ultimately, the resources available for conducting the survey and analysis of the results.

Political polls, customer satisfaction surveys, and personal interviews are pervasive in modern society as mechanisms to provide decision makers with information to formulate or to adjust their strategies. The news media frequently reports results from sampling efforts that typically address a country’s pulse with regard to political leadership. This is by no means a recent phenomenon as sampling (especially census work) has occurred for thousands of years. Survey sampling as a general methodology and finite population sampling as its rigorous theoretical basis are the subject areas of this part.

The methodology of survey sampling consists of a process of selecting a sample of items from a population, measuring these items, and then estimating population characteristics based on the results from the sample.

The text of ISO Standard has been approved as suitable for publication as an Indian Standard without deviations. Certain conventions are however not identical to those used in Indian Standards. Attention is particularly drawn to the following:

a) Wherever the words ‘International Standard’ appear referring to this standard, they should be read as ‘Indian Standard’.

b) Comma (,) has been used as a decimal marker while in Indian Standards, the current practice is to use a point (.) as the decimal marker.