Cutoff Sampling

Cutoff sampling is a sampling technique that is most often applied to highly skewed populations, such as business establishments that vary considerably in employee size, gross revenues, production volume, and so on. Data collected on establishment surveys (from businesses or other organizations, including farms) are often heavily skewed. For any variable of interest there would be a few large values, and more and more, smaller and smaller values. Therefore, most of the volume for a given data element (variable) would be covered by a small number of observations relative to the number of establishments in the universe of all such establishments. If a measure of size is used, say, number of employees or a measure of industrial capacity or some other appropriate measure, then the ...