Sociology 2205A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Central Limit Theorem, Statistical Inference, Statistical Parameter

• School: Western University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: Sociology 2205A/B
• Professor: Kathrine Gellinas

Document Summary

Problem: the population we wish to study are almost always to large that we are unable to gather information from every case. Solution: we chose a sample a carefully chosen subset of the population- and use information gathered from the cases in the sample to generalize to the population. Samples drawn according to the rule of epsem are likely to be representative. We can use the sampling distribution to calculate our population parameter based on our sample statistics. The single most important concept in inferential statistics. Definition: the distribution of a statistic for all possible samples of a given size (n) Every application of inferential statistics involves 3 different distributions. Information from the sample is linked to the population via the sampling distribution. Has a mean equal to the population mean x= . Has a standard deviation (standard error) equal to the population standard deviation divided by the square root of "n" x= / n.