SOC202H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Statistical Parameter, Statistical Hypothesis Testing, Statistic
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Inference to (cid:858)i(cid:374)fer(cid:859) (cid:373)ea(cid:374)s (cid:449)e dra(cid:449) a (cid:272)o(cid:374)(cid:272)lusio(cid:374) a(cid:271)out so(cid:373)e issue o(cid:374) the (cid:271)asis of a(cid:374)other piece of information: seldom are our samples representative of the population to which we want to generalize. Inferential statistics provides formal guidelines for helping to make this process rigorous and defensible. Statistics are mathematical characteristics of samples: parameters are mathematical characteristics of populations. Statistics are used to estimate parameters statistics are an inference about population parameters. Solution: we choose a sample a carefully chosen subset of population it should be representative of the population: representative: the sample has the same characteristics 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.
