Sample
What is a sample in statistics?
The part of the population we actually observe.
A sample is the part of the pot you get to taste. This works if our soup is well stirred and rested. And that way, our spoonful is informative about the rest of the pot. But if oil has risen to the top, a taste from the surface can mislead us no matter how many spoonfuls we take. This is why how we pick our sample matters as much as how many people are inside it.
From our own dataset
The spoonful. Our 15 to 20 interviews.
Where we teach it
Lesson 1.0 of Project 1: Sibling Interviews. Watch lesson 1.0 and read the notes, free, no account needed.
Related terms
- Population: Everything we want to know about: the whole group our question is about.
- Estimate: An educated guess about the population, made from the sample.