EXAMPLE 4 Sampling Songs

Professor Lesser has all 27 songs from the album called The Beatles One stored on a digital media player and wants to play four randomly chosen songs to accompany his morning commute. Let’s follow the four-step procedure for using the random-digit table to choose a simple random sample of size 4 from the 27-song playlist.

  • Step 1. Give each song a numerical label. Because two digits are needed to label the 27 songs, all the labels will have two digits. Table 7.2 lists the 27 songs with labels from 01 to 27.
    Table 7.4: Table 7.2 Songs from The Beatles One Album, Assigned to Two-Digit Labels
    01 Love Me Do 10 Help! 19 Hello, Goodbye
    02 From Me to You 11 Yesterday 20 Lady Madonna
    03 She Loves You 12 Day Tripper 21 Hey Jude
    04 I Want to Hold Your Hand 13 We Can Work it out 22 Get Back
    05 Can’t Buy Me Love 14 Paperback Writer 23 The Ballad of John and Yoko
    06 A Hard Day’s Night 15 Yellow Submarine 24 Something
    07 I Feel Fine 16 Eleanor Rigby 25 Come Together
    08 Eight Days a Week 17 Penny Lane 26 Let it Be
    09 Ticket to Ride 18 All You Need is Love 27 The Long and Winding Road
  • Step 2. We pick line 125 from Table 7.1. We begin writing two-digit groups as we read across line 125 of the table (since our song labels have two digits). We cross out any two-digit groups that are greater than our population size of 27 and any duplicates (18 is a duplicate):
    96 74 61 21 49 37 82 37 18 68 18 44 23 51 19 62 10 33 92 44
  • Step 3. We stop when we reach label 19 because we’ve identified 4 labels for our sample.
  • Step 4. Corresponding to the selected labels shaded in Step 2, our media player will play the following song sequence: “Hey Jude,” “All You Need is Love,” “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” and “Hello, Goodbye.”