Dear Hartley

Thanks for the reply. The study was a type of opinion survey trying to identify the causes of why health care professionals do not want stay in rural areas, why they want to migrate to cities, or to the developed countries. To collect the data a questionnaire was used where the questions contained economic, political, social, and professional aspects. 

A convenient type of sampling procedure was used to collect date, of course which was neither random nor representative.

The researcher used percentage (based on how many respondents answered a question "yes" among the total 300 respondents) to show the importance of different contributing factors.

Finally, based on the percentage the researcher drew some conclusions and put some suggestions to stop above mentioned migrations.

My question is about the strength of the findings (even if it were a random sample) which are purely based on percentage. To what extent we can be confident about the conclusion of identifying the factors contributing to/responsible for something which is a psychological or sociological phenomenon. It might be that other more important factors are there which are not included in the questionnaire or considered by the researcher. 

In a behavioral research what is the scope of using percetage to come to a conclusion.

Sorry, it has become a long mail. However, the answer will help me to clear up my confusion. Also, a reference article/book (available in the internet) will be helpful.

Regards

Akib

From: Andrew Hartley <khahstats@...>
Subject: [Statisticians_group] Percentage - Percentile?
To: Statisticians_group@...
Date: Thursday, April 30, 2009, 10:08 AM

Akib, I have difficulty approaching your question without more information. "Percentage" can mean many different things; are you speaking of "percentile? " Can you please explain more about what you want to do? What are you studying? What scientific conclusions do you want to draw? Are you looking at economic, biological, clinical, educational data or what? Are you trying to infer something about the location of a population? How certain do you need to be about that location? Why can't you take a purposive sample? --- On Thu, 4/30/09, akib ul <akib_du@yahoo. com> wrote: From: akib ul <akib_du@yahoo. com> Subject: [Statisticians_ group] please help me To: Statisticians_ group@yahoogroup s.co.in Date: Thursday, April 30, 2009, 4:43 AM Can anyone please tell me about the strength of "percentage" as a statistical tool to draw conclusion without doing any significance test and using purposive sample. Regards Akib