Sampling Design The objective of the research is to assist McDonalds in appealing to millennials. The company's North American sales have been flat for the past four years. Sales in the U.S., the company's largest market, were down 2.1% in 2014. This trend has resulted in a decline in net income. Changing consumer tastes are often cited as a problem for McDonalds -- the number of customers actually declined more than sales, by 4.1%. The research will help with this problem by testing the attitudes of millennials towards food.

The population consists of Americans who are in the millennial generation. This generation has been defined as those born between 1980 and the mid-2000s, according to the White House (CEA, 2014). These people range in age between 10 and 35 today. The cutoff for the population of the survey will be 18-30, so that the survey population are all adults, and all clearly within the millennial generation culturally-speaking. This also fits more in line with the U.S. Census Bureau's definition of millennial (1982-2000). There are 83.1 million people within the Census Bureau's definition.

The entire U.S. population of millennials is used as the population here for a couple of reasons. First, McDonalds targets all consumers. While...

Thus, there is no reason for geographic exclusion or exclusion from the population based on any other demographic factor.
The sampling frame is an interesting challenge. It is not sufficient to simply survey college students, as they only make up a portion of the target population. Additionally, there are challenges reaching millennials via conventional means. They rather famously do not answer their phones (Jenkins, 2015), and in-person surveys are expensive, given that McDonalds wants feedback from across the entire nation. The sampling frame will likely come via social media membership, or being customer of a telecommunications company. These are the easiest ways to reach millennials -- either compel them to fill out a survey online through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc., or prompt them via text spam purchased through their telecom carrier.

3. There are likely some biases that occur. For example, if ultimately the company chooses to reach millennials via phone, this is usually a landline. That probably orients the survey towards millennials who live at home, as they are…