COMM 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: United States Census Bureau, Reductionism, Sampling Error

• School: U of M
• Department: Communication Studies
• Course: COMM 101
• Professor: Julia Lippman

Document Summary

In social science, good sampling is critical to good research. Census: expensive, tells us about all americans. Ask this class: cheap, tells us about people who are currently taking 121. There are cases when each option is a better choice. Take away #1: you only learn about the kinds of people you sample. Generalizing: using a small portion of the people in order to learn about everybody. Sampling determines who it is that we are going to study, but generalization allows us to talk not just about the speci c individuals we studied, but also the kinds of people we studied. If a small group of people looks and acts like a larger group, you can use them to nd out about the larger group: this kind of group is called a representative sample. The goal: produce a representative sample, which looks and acts like the whole group of people that you want to describe.