Sociology 2205A/B Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Central Tendency, Simple Random Sample, Statistical Inference

• School: Western University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: Sociology 2205A/B
• Professor: William Marshall

Document Summary

A sample is representative if it reproduces the important characteristics of the population. Epsem: the equal probability of selection method, the fundamental principle of probability sampling. Most basic epsem sampling technique produces a simple random sample. These tables are lists of numbers that have no pattern to them. When we use inferential statistics we generally measure some variable (age, opinions about global warming) in the sample and then use the information from the sample to learn more about that variable in the population. Three types of information are generally necessary to adequately characterize a variable: (1) the shape of its distribution, (2) some measure of central tendency, (3) some measure of dispersion. We link information from the sample to the population with the sampling distribution, the theoretical, probabilistic distribution of a statistic for all possible samples of a certain sample size (n) Sampling distribution includes statistics that represent every conceivable combination of cases from the population.