For a sample to be representative:
- The people in the sample are selected randomly.
- The types of people in the sample are proportional to those in the population.
For the sample to be representative, the number of accounting, customer service, and sales employees in the sample needs to be proportional to the number of accounting, customer service, and sales employees in the company.
The employees in the sample also need to be randomly selected.
So, randomly selecting 3 accounting employees, 5 customer service employees, and 2 sales employees would produce a representative sample.
Therefore, selecting every tenth employee from an alphabetical list of the names of the employees in each department would produce a representative sample.