A Methodological Innovation in Creating Representative Samples of Organizations

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Attempts to generalize about organizations have been seriously hampered by the absense of an organization data base, or even a sampling procedure, generally recognized as valid, by which a representative sample of organizations could be selected. One potentially promising approach to this sampling problem entails selecting a representative sample of individuals, and asking them in some other manner. This approach is promising because a great deal is known about how to conduct sample surveys on populations of individuals. However, there is no known certainty that a representative sample of individuals will yield a representative sample of organizations. What is needed is some independently generated distribution of organizations, believed to be representative of the population of organizations, which can be used as a criterion to assess the validity of the individual - produced distribution. Such a criterion may be found in the files of the Internal Revenue Service. They may provide a comprehensive--and potentially exhaustive -- listing of organizations against which an individually - produced distribution of organiztions can be examined. This study will examine an area that corresponds roughly with metropolitan Los Angeles. A sample of nearly 1,000 individuals surveyed by telephone last Spring, produced information on over 1,000 voluntary and work organizations. The frequency with which different types of organizations appear in the tax-related records of the Internal Revenue Service will be compared to the distribution obtained from the greater Los Angeles survey. The significance of any observed differences will be assessed using Chow tests.