TL;DR: The respondents of the study section names who supplied your data, how many, where, and on what basis they qualified. It sits in Chapter 3, it is short, and it is checked closely, because a panel can attack an entire study by attacking who was asked. Write it as six elements: identity, setting, number, inclusion and exclusion criteria, sampling technique, and consent. Keep the three numbers straight, population, sample and actual respondents, and report the gap between them rather than hiding it.
Searching for "respondents of the study" usually means you are writing Chapter 3 and are staring at a heading you have been told to fill but not told what to put in. The section looks trivial and is not. It is where a panel checks whether the people you asked can actually answer the question you posed, and a mismatch there is unfixable later without collecting data again.
This guide sets out what belongs in the section, how respondents differ from the population and the sample, how to write inclusion and exclusion criteria that hold up, and two complete illustrative write-ups, one quantitative and one qualitative, that you can study as patterns.
DepEd's Practical Research 2 curriculum guide lists the competency "describes sampling procedure and the sample" (CS_RS12-IIa-c-2) directly alongside constructing the instrument and planning data collection. That grouping is deliberate. Who you ask, what you ask them, and what you do with the answers are one decision, assessed as three sections.
Which subject is this for? Practical Research 1 and 2 are applied subjects of the 2016 K to 12 Senior High School curriculum, and that structure is being replaced. DepEd Order No. 017, s. 2026 institutionalises the Strengthened Senior High School Curriculum for Grade 11 from SY 2026-2027 and Grade 12 from SY 2027-2028, and its Annex A lists Research 1 and Research 2 as 80-hour Academic Track electives in the Field Experience cluster rather than applied subjects everyone takes. Grade 12 learners not enrolled in pilot schools continue under the 2016 curriculum for SY 2026-2027. Nothing below changes either way; what changed is the subject label and who takes it. See our guide to the Strengthened SHS Curriculum.
Population, Sample, Respondents: Keep the Three Straight
| Term | What it means | Illustrative figure |
|---|---|---|
| Population | Every unit that fits your definition | All 420 Grade 11 students enrolled in one school |
| Target population | The part of the population you can realistically reach | The 380 currently attending face-to-face classes |
| Sample | The subset you selected, using a stated technique | 195 students drawn by stratified random sampling |
| Respondents | Those who actually returned usable data | 178 usable questionnaires |
| Unit of analysis | The thing each row of your data represents | One student |
The figures above are illustrative, constructed for this guide, and are not from a real school.
Three numbers, not one. Chapter 3 should state the population, the computed or targeted sample, and, once collection is finished, the number of usable responses with the resulting rate. Papers that report a single number invite the obvious question: is that what you planned or what you got?
The unit of analysis row is worth pausing on. If you survey 178 students but your research question is about six schools, your unit of analysis is the school and you have six data points, not 178. Getting this wrong quietly invalidates the statistics.
What the Section Must Contain
Six elements, in roughly this order:
- Who they are. Grade level, role, and the characteristic that makes them relevant to the question.
- Where they are. The specific school, barangay, city or organisation, named or anonymised in line with your ethics approval.
- How many. Population size, sample size, and how the sample size was arrived at.
- Inclusion and exclusion criteria. The rules that decide membership.
- Sampling technique. Named, and matched to your design. See our guide to sampling techniques for student research for which one fits.
- Consent arrangements. Who consented, who assented if respondents are minors, and what institutional permission was obtained.
What does not belong here: their answers, their scores, their demographic breakdown as a result. The profile table showing that 54 percent were female belongs in Chapter 4, because it is a finding. Chapter 3 says how you would find them; Chapter 4 says what you found.
Writing Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
Criteria are rules, not adjectives. The test is whether a stranger holding your criteria could look at a person and decide yes or no without consulting you.
Illustrative criteria, constructed for this guide:
Inclusion. Officially enrolled in Grade 11 at the named school for the current school year; attending face-to-face classes; owns and personally uses a smartphone; able to give assent, with parental or guardian consent obtained.
Exclusion. Took part in the pilot test of the instrument; enrolled after the start of the second quarter, since the study asks about a full quarter of habits; declined consent or withdrew at any point.
Two things make these work. Each is checkable, and each has a reason attached. "Enrolled after the second quarter began" is not fussiness; it exists because the recall window in the instrument is a quarter long, and a student who was not there cannot answer honestly. A panel will ask why a criterion exists. Have the sentence ready.
Excluding pilot-test participants matters more than students expect. If the same person answers a draft instrument and then the final one, their second answers are contaminated by the first, and your reliability figure and your results both become questionable.
Worked Example 1: A Quantitative Write-Up
The study below is illustrative, constructed for this guide. It is not real research and the numbers are invented for the purpose of showing the pattern. Do not submit it.
Illustrative study: the relationship between daily smartphone screen time and self-reported sleep quality among Grade 11 students in one public senior high school in Cebu City.
The respondents of this study were Grade 11 students officially enrolled at [School], a public senior high school in Cebu City, for School Year 2026-2027. Of the 420 Grade 11 students enrolled, 380 were attending face-to-face classes and formed the target population. A sample of 195 respondents was drawn through stratified random sampling, with the strata defined by strand and the number of respondents per stratum allocated proportionally to its share of the target population.
To qualify, a student had to be officially enrolled in Grade 11 at the school for the current school year, attending face-to-face classes, and a personal smartphone user. Students who participated in the pilot testing of the instrument, those who enrolled after the start of the second quarter, and those who did not obtain parental or guardian consent were excluded.
Written permission to conduct the study was secured from the school head. Parental or guardian consent was obtained for all respondents who are minors, and each respondent gave written assent before answering. Participation was voluntary, responses were treated as confidential, and results are reported only in aggregate.
Of the 195 questionnaires distributed, 184 were returned and 178 were usable after six were discarded for incomplete responses, giving a usable response rate of 91.3 percent.
Read what each paragraph is doing. The first establishes the population and how the sample was reached. The second gives the rules. The third handles ethics. The fourth reports what actually happened, which is written after data collection, not before.
That final paragraph is the one most students omit, and it is the one that makes the section credible. Note also that 178 respondents, not 195, is the number that must appear in every table in Chapter 4.
Worked Example 2: A Qualitative Write-Up
Also illustrative and constructed for this guide.
Qualitative studies do not "sample" in the statistical sense and normally use the heading Participants of the Study. The logic changes from representativeness to information richness.
Illustrative study: the lived experiences of Grade 12 working students balancing part-time employment and academic requirements in one city division.
The participants of this study were eight Grade 12 students who were employed part-time for at least three months while enrolled full-time. Participants were selected through purposive sampling, specifically criterion sampling, so that every participant had direct experience of the phenomenon under study. Recruitment continued until data saturation was observed, that is, until two consecutive interviews yielded no new themes.
To be included, a participant had to be enrolled in Grade 12 at a public senior high school in the division, employed in paid work for at least 10 hours per week for a minimum of three months, and willing to be interviewed and audio-recorded. Students employed within their own household without formal working hours were excluded, since the study concerns the demands of external employment.
The differences are structural, not cosmetic. There is no percentage, no margin of error and no proportional allocation, because none of those concepts apply. Sample size is justified by saturation rather than by a formula. If your design is qualitative, our guide to qualitative research designs explains how the design itself constrains who your participants can be.
Describing Respondents in Chapter 4
Chapter 3 says who you planned to reach. Chapter 4 opens with the profile table showing who you actually reached, and it should present only the profile variables your sub-problems named.
A respondent profile table normally reports frequency and percentage per category, with the total matching your usable-response count exactly. If your profile table totals 195 while your correlation used 178 cases, a panel will find the discrepancy, and it will cost more than the underlying error did.
Anything beyond description, whether groups differ, whether variables relate, belongs to the analysis proper. Our guide to analysing data in a student research paper covers what comes after the profile table.
Common Mistakes That Cost Marks
- Describing respondents you never actually reached. Write the section in the past tense after collection, and update the numbers.
- Using "respondents" for interview participants. The term signals your approach. Mixing them suggests the design was not thought through.
- Criteria that cannot be checked. "Students who are interested in the topic" is not a criterion.
- Convenience sampling presented as random. If you surveyed whichever sections your adviser could get you into, that is convenience sampling. Name it honestly and list the limitation.
- Forgetting the pilot-test exclusion. It is the single most commonly missed exclusion criterion in student work.
- Silence on non-response. Report distributed, returned, and usable. All three.
- Respondents who cannot answer the question. Asking Grade 7 students about senior high school subject choice produces data, but not data about your problem. Match respondents to the statement of the problem before anything else.
A Short Checklist Before You Submit
- Can a reader tell exactly who qualified, without asking you?
- Are the population, sample and usable-response figures all present and consistent with every table in Chapter 4?
- Is the sampling technique named, and does it match the design?
- Are consent, assent and institutional permission all documented in the appendices?
- Does every profile variable you collected appear in a sub-problem, and vice versa?
- Are the limits of who you asked reflected in your scope and limitations section?
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Disclaimer: departmental research manuals differ on section headings, required sub-parts and the level of ethical documentation expected. Confirm your own school's format before finalising Chapter 3.
Sources
- DepEd — K to 12 Senior High School Applied Track, Practical Research 2 Curriculum Guide — competency CS_RS12-IIa-c-2, describing the sampling procedure and the sample
- DepEd — K to 12 Senior High School Applied Track, Practical Research 1 Curriculum Guide — qualitative research competencies
- DepEd — DO 016, s. 2017, Research Management Guidelines
- Republic Act No. 10173, Data Privacy Act of 2012 (LawPhil)
- SchoolFinderPH — Sampling Techniques for Student Research
- SchoolFinderPH — Thesis Chapters 1 to 5
