SOAN 2120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Statistical Theory, Sampling Distribution, Sampling Error

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Sociology and Anthropology
• Course: SOAN 2120
• Professor: D Walters

Document Summary

How do we know that a z score of plus or minus 2 translates to a p value of . 05: calculus, derivatives, software does it for us in this course. ****just as variables have distributions, sample statistics do as well. Statistical inference if we infer something it means we draw a conclusion stat inference is a tool for drawing conclusions from data that are a random sample. Repeated sampling: take a large number of samples from the same population, calculate the same statistic for each sample and make a histogram of all the values, the resulting distribution will approximate the sampling distribution. How do we know that the mean of a distribution of samples is the same as the population mean: statistical theory, simulations. Take a sample (income of 40,000 people) Calculate the mean of those 40,000 (treat this as the populations) Take simple random samples from the population.