[Page 873]When designing a study, researchers must decide how they will obtain participants, a process called sample selection. Although studying the entire population of interest (e.g., all college students in the United States) might be ideal, it is not usually feasible. Thus, researchers must choose a sampling method to obtain a smaller set of participants for a study, one that is reasonably representative of the larger population. A convenience sample is a group of people who are invited to participate in the study due to their being conveniently located and accessible for recruitment. This is a type of nonprobability sampling and can be contrasted with random sampling, which refers to a method of randomly choosing a group of people from the population to be invited ...