8.5 Population in “random” order
systematic sampling is sometimes used, for its convenience, in populations in which the numbering of the units is effectively random. This is so in sampling from a file arranged alphabetically by surnames, if the item that is being measured has no relation to the surname of the individual. There will then be no trend or stratification in y as we proceed along the file and no correlation between neighboring values.
In this situation we would expect systematic sampling to be essentially equivalent to simple random sampling and to have the same variance. For any single finite population, with given values of n and k, this is not exactly true, because V, which is based on only k degrees of freedom, is rather erratic when k is small and may turn out to be either greater or smaller than V . There are two results which show that on the average the two variances are equal.