Self-Selected Sample

In a self-selected sample, the members of the sample are the people who are willing to participate. Since people participate voluntarily in these samples, the samples are also called voluntary response samples. Consider an example. |c| A survey about internet shopping is posted online. People volunteer to participate or simply ignore it. The following applet shows a certain number of people who volunteer to participate in the survey.

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Biased or Unbiased Sampling

A self-selected sample is a biased sample because people with strong opinions, either positive or negative, about the topic studied are more likely to volunteer. Also, people who are interested in the topic being studied may be more likely to participate, while those who are not interested may refuse to participate.

As a result, such a sample is not representative of the population because it underrepresents people with neutral opinions about the topic or who are not interested in it.