3.3. Sampling overview

This week we introduce review some key ideas about sampling, and the relationship between sample and population.

The following videos are from last year’s version of the course so there may be a couple of unfamiliar terms, or mentions of ‘the exercise you did last week’ (which you haven’t heard of!) but nonetheless I think these could be a useful resource

3.3.1. Sample vs population

As scientists we always work with a sample of data, but we are interested in generaliing our results to the wider population.

3.3.2. Sampling with and without replacement

There are two types of sampling, with and without replacement.

This video explains the difference:

3.3.3. What is the sampling distribution of the mean?

To determine statistical significance, we need to understand how much our test statistic would vary due to random chance in other samples from the same population.

• The sampling distribution of the mean is the distribution you would get if you took many different samples of sie \(n\) from the population and calculated each of our means