SOCY 211 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Statistical Inference, Confidence Interval, Sample Size Determination

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Social Sci, Edu and Soc Work - Sociology
• Course: SOCY 211
• Professor: Carl Keane

Document Summary

Inferential statistics: inferences about a population based on results from a sample . You draw a random sample from the population. Everybody in the population has an equal probability of ending in the sample. The law of large numbers- the larger the denominator, the smaller the standard error. Our estimate is that the mean age for the population in question is between 38. 25 years and 41. 75. This 5% probability of error is called alpha. Now let"s do this again but with a sample size of 2000. Therefore the margin of error is 1. 76 years. There are two variables that are related: education-------- > income. Does education have an impact of income: causation- association does not mean causation, you need: association, sequence and non spuriousness, direction- positive direction: as education goes up, income goes up. This could also be negative: independent and dependent variables (education, cause; income, effect)