Populations & Samples Flashcards
What is a POPULATION?
a collection of an entire group of something being investigated. It is the total.
What is a SAMPLE?
a subset or small part of a population.
What is a PARAMETER?
a piece of information that is collected from or about a population.
What is a STATISTIC?
a piece of information that is collected from or about a sample.
What is a HYPOTHESIS?
an opinion or claim made about the people or items in a population.
What is DESCRIPTIVE STATISTICS?
information from a sample that describes the features about the sample.
What is INFERENTIAL STATISTICS?
information from a sample that is used to create opinions, claims, or predications about the population that the sample was taken from.
What is SAMPLE SIZE?
the number of people or items taken from a population to create a sample.
What is MARGIN OF ERROR?
a numerical value that is the approximation of how much the information taken from the sample will differ from the information taken from the actual population.
What is a SAMPLING DISTRIBUTION?
the variety of data (of a particular type: mean, mode, median. etc.) that is collected from many different samples. The fact that the data is collected from many different samples (that are the same size and from the same population) means that the value for the mean that is calculated will match the value for the mean that would have been calculated from the actual population.
What is a CONFIDENCE INTERVAL?
a range of values produced by examining the data collected from a sample that predicts the value that would occur within the actual population. This range of values has a lower limit and an upper limit and contains a certain amount of error.
