An equity analyst needs to select a representative sample of manufacturing stocks. Starting with the population of all publicly traded manufacturing stocks, she classifies each stock into one of the 20 industry groups that form the Index of" Industrial Production for the manufacturing industry. She then selects a number of stocks from each industry based on its weight in the index. The sampling method the analyst is using is best characterized as:()
A. data mining.
B. nonrandom sampling.
C. stratified random sampling.