SOC202H1 Lecture 4: Lecture 4
Document Summary
Infer: means we draw a conclusion about some issue on the basis of another piece of information, making a broader claim about something else. Seldom are our samples representative of the population to which we want to generalize. Inferential statistics provides formal guidelines fro helping to make this process rigorous and defensible. Review: recall that populations are typically too large and thus it is not feasible to get information from the entire population- we rely on samples. Sample: a carefully chosen subset of the population- and use information gathered representative of the population. Representative: the sample has the same characteristics in the aggregate as the population. Estimating population parameters from sample statistics requires that samples are representative of the population: samples drawn according to the rule of epsem (equal probability of selection. Method), in which every case in the population has the same chance of being selected for the sample are likely to be representative sample.
