Skip to content
Closer - The home of longitudinal research

Socially stratified sample

A stratified sample is a representational sample of a population that is acquired by splitting the population into homogeneous sub-groups called strata. With socially-stratified samples, each stratum/sub-group consists of people with similar characteristics based on socio-economic factors such as income, race, gender or educational attainment among other factors. Stratified random sampling (also known as proportional random sampling) is when random samples from the strata are taken, in proportion to the population. In disproportionate sampling, the strata are not proportional to the population.