PSYB04H3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Random Number Table, Ibm Officevision, Top Priority
Document Summary
Chapter 7: estimating the frequency of behaviors and beliefs. It is important to external validity that the results of a study can be applied to entire population. The researcher tends to want to generalize to other members of the population or other settings. Populations are the entire set of the entire set of individuals that we are interested in. A sample is a smaller set taken from the entire population. When performing a census, we gather information from the entire population rather than from a smaller sample. Most of the time a researcher does not need to perform a census but the external validity of the study relies on how well the sample represents the rest of the population. If not performing a census researchers tend to use smaller samples, then they must decide whether the sample they have selected is biased or not. There also must be a population to generalize to; this is the population of interest.
