Population and Sample

 POPULATION AND SAMPLE

A population is an entire group or complete set of individuals or elements about which some specific information is required or in other words something you want to draw a conclusion about.

So far researchers are interested in answering general questions of interest such as:

·  Architects are interested in understanding the design preferences of all homeowners in a specific urban area.

·    Computer scientists are interested in exploring the efficiency of all algorithms used in a specific category of software applications.

·     Economists are interested in studying the spending habits of all households in a particular country.

·   Environmental scientists are interested in monitoring the pollution levels of all water bodies within a designated region.

·    Psychologists are looking for general rules about all people (how do people learn a language?)

·       Statisticians are interested in analyzing the salary distribution of all employed statisticians in the field of academia.

Whatever it is you want to make generalizations about, you have to make a large collection of data either individuals or objects that you are interested in. This is known as population. Reaching the whole population might be cumbersome due to time or resources, so researchers often make use of samples drawn from the population to make a conclusion about the larger population. This is known as a sample.

A sample is a subset of a population in which true inferences about the population can be made. Note that a sample can be used to make a good guess about the population. Therefore, the larger the sample size the better our confidence level.