Sample and Sampling The  sample represents  the population of  those critical characteristics you  plan to  study. In other words,  if the  sample  is representative of  th'e population  you can  say that what you have found out about the sample  is  true  of the population. The term representative means  that sample subjects are not selected haphazardly, but deliberately  so that every element  in  the population has  an equal chance of being selected for the study. If you  take  all the rural mothers  of village  "A" as your population, you will perhaps study one whole population. Whereas if you define your population  as all rural mothers of  India-you cannot possibly study  the whole group. Even  if you can, it is a waste of money and time. The process of selecting a fraction ofthe sampling unit of your target population for inclusion  in your study  is called  sampling. 

The population  "element"  consists of the characteristics  or  attributes  of the subjects that  the  researcher wants to  study.  A  true representative sample consists of similar elements; these are called the sampling elements. Each sampling unit  can be  the sampling element itself or it  may  contain a number of sampling elements. For example, the researcher  wants  to study the health status  of rural  mothers and finds that there are Hindu, Muslim and Christian mothers from which  helshe  can  select the  sample;  hence each group becomes a sampling  unit.  In each unit, a number  of  sampling elements, mothers  in  this case are present.

Sampling technique  will  then involve getting representatives  from  each unit. Sampling refers to the process  of  selecting portion of the population that represents  the entire population. A  sample then consists of the subsets of the population. A  single member of a population is called elements.