POPM 3240 Study Guide - Quiz Guide: Internal Validity, Null Hypothesis, Multistage Sampling

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Population Medicine
• Course: POPM 3240
• Professor: Cathy Bauman

Document Summary

Need to ensure that your sample is representative of the large population. Census: systematically acquiring and recording relevant information about every member of a given population (like the canadian census) Good way to get detailed information, but impractical! Difficult if participation is voluntary (not mandatory) Sample: selecting a portion of the population and acquiring and recording relevant information from those selected members (like randomly selecting 10% of ontarians) Allows researchers to infer information about a population without investigating every individual. Must have a large enough sample size to infer a true association: determining who/what to sample. Can affect validity of results if not done properly. Representativeness: establish inclusion/exclusion criteria before you start sampling. Inclusion criteria: set of characteristics the subject must have to be included in the study. Exclusion criteria: a set of characteristics that, if possessed, will prevent a potential subject from participating in the study. Target population: population to which it might be possible to extrapolate results.