Population
What is a population in statistics?
Everything we want to know about: the whole group our question is about.
A population is not necessarily a country. It is whatever group your question is actually about, and you decide what that group is when you write your research question. If you ask how many hours teenagers sleep, your population is teenagers. If you ask how many hours the teenagers at your school sleep, your population is the students at your school. Most of the trouble in statistics starts when someone measures one population and talks as though they measured another.
In Lesson 1.0, we call the population a pot of soup and make the analogy that we don't need to drink a whole pot to know how it tastes.
From our own dataset
The whole pot of soup. All teenagers, not just the ones we met.
Where we teach it
Lesson 1.0 of Project 1: Sibling Interviews. Watch lesson 1.0 and read the notes, free, no account needed.