PSY 207 Lecture 9: Sampling Distributions
Document Summary
Sampling error is the discrepancy, or amount of error, between a sample statistic and its corresponding population parameter. Sampling error makes it difficult to generalize from samples to populations: makes it unclear whether what we observe in the sample is reflective of what exists in the population, or is simply a product of sampling error. To generalize from samples to populations, we need to know to what degree is what we find in the sample reflective of the population or due to sampling error. If a sample is very unlikely given what we know about the population we conclude the sample is not representative of the pop. They pile up around 5, the population mean. The standard deviation of a sampling distribution is called standard error. The standard error of the mean measures exactly how much difference should be expected on average between a sample mean and .
