PhD thesis Title Page Final _Richard Juma - Victoria University ...

posses all the trappings of an emerging urban centre. Lokichar was
therefore seen as presenting a different socio-economic environment to
influence adjustments to drought and famine.
In summary, the choice of the two sites, Morulem and Lokichar, was
determined by the need to find affected Turkana households whose
experience would be recorded to help answer the research objectives.
Additional care was taken to include in the survey both rural and urban
environments for purposes of comparison.
3.3 Sampling of informants.
Sampling can be defined as the process of selecting a representative set of
cases from a much larger set (Ragin 1994). There were two kinds of data
sources in this study which required sampling. These were the household
surveys and key informant interviews. A random sampling method was
used to select the respondents. The Turkana Rehabilitation Project
Management (TRPM) kept registers of all the Turkana households (awis) at
each of the sites. These were the registers used to prepare the sampling
frame for the interviews.
Sampling households: Since there were large numbers of households at
each site living roughly in loose clusters, a multi-stage sampling method
was chosen as the best way of selecting the respondents 52. The units of
analysis were the household (awi). The households were listed as they
appeared in the records held by the Turkana Rehabilitation Project
Management and sampled. The purpose of this method was to avoid bias
in the sample, and to steer me to households throughout the research
sites. Households studied were randomly selected. Details are shown in
Figure 5 below.
52 Bryman (2004) asserts that multi-stage sampling is preferably used whenever the aim
is to interview a sample that is to be drawn from a widely dispersed population such as
national population, or a large region, or even a large city.
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