Slovin’s Formula

Slovin’s Formula is a formula that is used to determine what sample size should be chosen to
study a given population depending on the error tolerance level of the investigator.

For example, suppose that you want to know about the voting preferences of a given
population. It is not feasible to ask each and every person about their voting preferences. In
such a situation, it is reasonable to select a random sample from the entire population and
interview only those people who are selected. But this introduces scope for error in the study.
We also need to decide how many people should be included in our sample.

Clearly, a larger sample will minimize the error and a smaller sample greatly increases the error
rate. Generally, a 5% error rate is considered acceptable. Given an acceptable error limit, we
can use Slovin’s formula to decide the size of the randomly selected sample.

Slovin’s Formula:
Let ‘N’ denote the size of the population and ‘e’ denote the maximum acceptable error limit.
Then the sample size ‘n’ can be calculated using the formula,

Example 1:
Suppose that a company wants to conduct marketing supply research to know about consumer
preferences. The company estimates that a total of N = 10000 people are regular loyal
customers of the company. How many of these people should be interviewed to understand
customer preferences? Take the margin of error to be 5%.

Solution: We want to choose a random sample of size ‘n’ from the entire population of
customers. Applying Slovin’s formula we get that,

This means that a total of 385 people should be randomly selected and interviewed to conduct
research on consumer preferences.
Example 2:
Suppose that the population size in a study is N=5000 and the margin of error is 3%. How many
units should be chosen in a randomly selected sample?

Solution: By Slovin’s formula we get that,

This means that a total of 1667 units should be randomly selected.

Remarks:

-Slovin’s formula cannot be used to determine the sample size if the population size is very
small.

-As a general rule, it was suggested by Gay (1978) that the sample size should be 20% of the
given population for small population sizes (less than 500), and the sample size should be 10%
of the given population for population sizes greater than 1000.