Stratified sampling is a structured approach to participant recruitment in which a population is divided into meaningful subgroups, such as age bands, income tiers, usage frequency, or geographic region, and a defined number of participants is drawn from each stratum. In qualitative research operations, stratified sampling prevents dominant segments from crowding out minority voices that may carry disproportionate strategic value. The method is particularly important in multi-market and multi-segment studies where a purely random draw would routinely under-represent smaller but commercially significant groups. Applied rigorously, stratified sampling improves the credibility of findings and gives stakeholders confidence that conclusions reflect the full range of customer experience rather than the loudest or most accessible slice of it.