week 4 SCM (sampling and linear equations)

Question 1

what does the standard error of the mean measure and how to calculate it?

Answer 1

• how far the sample mean of the data is likely to be from the true population mean
• it is the standard deviation divided by the square root of the sample size
• it is in fact the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of the mean

Question 2

what is the sampling distribution of the mean?

Answer 2

if you repeat a study many times with different samples, and plot the mean results of each sample on a histogram this will show the sampling distribution

Question 3

do larger samples yield smaller or larger scm values?

Answer 3

smaller

Question 4

what is the central limit theory?

Answer 4

the theory that when sampling sizes are sufficiently large, the sampling distribution of the mean becomes normally distributed

this is true even if the data within each sample is not evenly distributed