An investigator will be studying nutrition among Latina women. To find participants to interview, she requested a list of names and contact information for all Latina women from a community clinic....

An investigator will be studying nutrition among Latina women. To find participants to interview, she requested a list of names and contact information for all Latina women from a community clinic. These women had already provided consent and had agreed to be contacted about participating in future research studies. The list included 1,000 names of potential participants for the nutrition study. The investigator chose 200 of the women from this list to contact for possible inclusion in the study.

What if the researcher decided to ignore the random selection procedures as described in the example (e.g. pulling names from a hat, using a computer program to generate random numbers)? How would this affect the results of the study?