Sample Size Calculator

 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                               
     
       

        		       

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The margin of error is the amount of error that you can tolerate. If 90% of respondents answer yes, while 10% answer no, you may be able to tolerate a larger amount of error than if the respondents are split 50-50 or 45-55. Lower margin of error requires a larger sample size.

5% is a common choice        

       
       

       

       

        		       

%

        		       

The confidence level is the amount of uncertainty you can tolerate. Suppose that you have 20 yes-no questions in your survey. With a confidence level of 95%, you would expect that for one of the questions (1 in 20), the percentage of people who answer yes would be more than the margin of error away from the true answer. The true answer is the percentage you would get if you exhaustively interviewed everyone. Higher confidence level requires a larger sample size.

Typical choices are 90%, 95%, or 99%

 
       

       

        		       

        		       

How many people are there to choose your random sample from? The sample size doesn't change much for populations larger than 20,000.

If you don't know, use 20000

       

       

        		       

%

        		       

For each question, what do you expect the results will be? If the sample is skewed highly one way or the other,the population probably is, too. If you don't know, use 50%, which gives the largest sample size. See below under More information if this is confusing.

Leave this as 50%

       
       

        		       

%

        		       

For each question, what do you expect the results will be? If the sample is skewed highly one way or the other,the population probably is, too. If you don't know, use 50%, which gives the largest sample size. See below under More information if this is confusing.

If you don't know, leave this as 50%

       
Your recommended sample size is        

377

        		This is the minimum recommended size of your survey. If you create a sample of this many people and get responses from everyone, you're more likely to get a correct answer than you would from a large sample where only a small percentage of the sample responds to your survey.
       

Alternate scenarios
With a sample size of With a confidence level of
Your margin of error would be
9.78%
6.89%
5.62%
 Your sample size would need to be
267
377
643

More information

If 50% of all the people in a population of 20000 people drink coffee in the morning, and if you were repeat the survey of 377 people ("Did you drink coffee this morning?") many times, then 95% of the time, your survey would find that between 45% and 55% of the people in your sample answered "Yes".

The remaining 5% of the time, or for 1 in 20 survey questions, you would expect the survey response to more than the margin of error away from the true answer.

When you survey a sample of the population, you don't know that you've found the correct answer, but you do know that there's a 95% chance that you're within the margin of error of the correct answer.

Try changing your sample size and watch what happens to the alternate scenarios. That tells you what happens if you don't use the recommended sample size, and how M.O.E and confidence level (that 95%) are related.

To learn more if you're a beginner, read Basic Statistics: A Modern Approach and The Cartoon Guide to Statistics. Otherwise, look at the more advanced books.

In terms of the numbers you selected above, the sample size n and margin of error E are given by where N is the population size, r is the fraction of responses that you are interested in, and Z(c/100) is the critical value for the confidence level c.

If you'd like to see how we perform the calculation, view the page source. This calculation is based on the Normal distribution, and assumes you have more than about 30 samples.

About Response distribution:  If you ask a random sample of 10 people if they like donuts, and 9 of them say, "Yes", then the prediction that you make about the general population is different than it would be if 5 had said, "Yes", and 5 had said, "No". Setting the response distribution to 50% is the most conservative assumption. So just leave it at 50% unless you know what you're doing. The sample size calculator computes the critical value for the normal distribution. Wikipedia has good articles on statistics.