SOCB05H3 Lecture 4: SOCB05 Lecture 4.docx
Document Summary
It would be nice for research to just observe all the people, to know about everyone we"re interested in but unfortunately that"s not possible. Not only is it not time efficient but it"s costly. Because we aren"t able to observe everyone we"re interested in, what we have to do is called sampling. We have a large population and we have to get a sub-group, a manageable group of that population to study in our survey for our study design. Because we don"t want to spend time on a group of people who are not going to be reflective of the larger population. So sampling is selecting a subset of observations from a population of interest, often with the attempt of generalizing these characteristics from our sample to our population. This is what we call a theoretical population. For some studies, we"ll have a sampling frame. Sub-set of a population: smaller group of the population.
