selecting a group from which to gather data on the basis of personal opinion as to what is representative of the population under study. For example, judgment sampling could involve choosing a number of well-informed people from different social groups and asking them who they believe will be the next U.S. president. The outcome from such a study may well not be consistent with the result of asking a random sample from the population. This means that although judgment sampling may be useful in a pilot study, it generally does not result in warranted inference to any population of interest. See deliberate sampling.