An Analysis of Sampling in Quantitative research of urban planning based on the survey (Case study: Journal of Research and Urban Planning in year 2019, no. 36 and 37)

Sampling is one of the practical items of methodology in urban planning researches during recent decades that because of its significant role in improving the quality and credit of researches, analyses of design procedure, applying and reporting based on logics of sampling theory, seems to be essential. This research concerns with the articles based on sampling where have been published in Journal of Research and Urban Planning 2015 as the sample, with quality method. Here, the methods of sampling of this report have been evaluated analytically. The results show great considerable errors in reporting the methodology of the sampling in most of the articles. For example, in the ten studied articles regarding the methods of explaining, the sampling criterions (100% not reported), sampling methods (55% not reported and 45 % incomplete reports, incorrect or unclear), determining the statistics society (45% not reported 30% incomplete or unclear), determining the ways of access to samples (70% not reported 5% incomplete or unclear), seems not to be trustworthy. On the other hand, the only index which could be almost acceptable is reporting the numbers of samples (%80 exact and complete and %20 incomplete and unclear). In general, the method of reporting the procedure of sampling in these articles seems to be incomplete and unclear (in %50 of cases), incomplete and incorrect (in %10 of cases), and incomplete, incorrect, and unclear (in %40 of cases). Therefore, none of them includes a complete, clear, and correct report (in all indexes at the same time) of the method of sampling.  Therefor lacking of a clear scientific pattern in reporting the sampling method based on rules and assumptions of the sampling theory in the studied researches, could influence the scientific quality (i.e. validity, reliability and generalizability) of them. This problem requires a serious attention of science member’s society in fields of urban planning to methodology of sampling in teaching process, searching, analyzing and publishing scientific researches.