Sampling
Paper details:
Asked to assess the effectiveness of this program in reducing behavioral problems among the inmates as well as recidivism rates for those inmates who are released after participating in the program. Specifically, you’ll be asked to take a representative sample of the prisoners who are part of this program and those who have not participated in it (but have participated in other workforce programs as noted below) in order to determine whether working with animals is particularly effective in reducing behavioral problems and recidivism among the prison population. In constructing your sample, you may find the following information useful: The K-9 training program operates in 8 prisons in Colorado. You do NOT need to know anything else about the prison system in Colorado. This is a hypothetical exercise, so we’ll just use those 8 prisons as a starting point Colorado Correctional Industries (CCI) operates a number of other programs in Colorado prisons, ranging from furniture manufacturing to making custom fly fishing rods to firefighting units. In broad terms, you will want to consider the effectiveness of the animal training program relative to non-animal-related workforce development programs as part of this initiative. See https://www.coloradoci.com/bin-htm/aboutUs.html?workforce (Links to an external site.) for a description of all of the initiatives that CCI operates. Your sample should be a multi-stage cluster sample stratified on type of offense (violent versus nonviolent) of approximately 100 inmates total. Though in real life there are unequal numbers of violent and nonviolent offenders in Colorado’s prison system, you can assume that these two types of offenders are equally represented in each prison with this program in developing your strata. You may choose the clusters that make sense in constructing your sample — for instance, prisons, cell blocks, or the like. You can make certain hypothetical assumptions about this population as needed for this exercise in completing this exercisagne, but be sure to explain these assumptions.
