Correct Response: A. Randomization will ensure that all members of the population will have an equal likelihood of being included in the study. This will reduce potential bias resulting from known tendencies, such as the overrepresentation of larger or more conspicuous individuals in the study, as well as from the effects of important variables that may be unknown to the researcher. An underlying bias can make the level of statistical significance irrelevant (B), and truly random sampling clearly won’t guarantee reproducible results (C). A larger sample size may increase reproducibility of the results, but is independent of the randomness of the sampling procedure (D).
