SOC202H1 Lecture 4: Lecture 4 Jan 31st 2012 SOC202H1 Professor Montazer
Document Summary
So far we have been pretending that the social researcher investigates the entire group that he/she tries to understand. Why: limited time and energy, limited economic resources, often not possible to get a hold of every single person of a population (i. e. , homeless, those abroad, etc) Often researchers study only a sample a smaller number of individuals from the population: each member has equal chance of being selected. In order for the sample to be representative of the population, it has to be a random sample: every single person in a population would have to have an equal chance of being selected. By design some samples are not random (i. e. , snow ball sampling). But for now we will talk about random sampling. Mean of a sample shown as x(with a line over it) Mean of a population shown as u (mu) Mean or standard deviation of a sample rarely identical to the population.
