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Statistics vocabulary · Sampling

Population

Meaning in statistics, with examples

/ˌpɑːpjəˈleɪʃən/nounCore term

In statistics, population means: The whole group of people, items or events that a study wants to draw conclusions about, for example all adults in a country or all invoices issued in one year.

In Turkish: anakütle, evren, popülasyon

How it is used

Defined before sampling: researchers describe the 'target population' and then draw a sample from it. A value that describes the population (such as μ) is called a parameter; one calculated from a sample is a statistic.

Example sentences

  1. The target population was all registered nurses working in public hospitals in Izmir.

  2. We can't survey the entire population, so we'll take a random sample of 1,200 households.

Common collocations

  • target population
  • population mean
  • study population
  • general population
  • generalise to the population
  • sampleA smaller group selected from a population and actually studied, so that conclusions about the whole population can be drawn from it.
  • sampling frameThe actual list or source from which a sample is drawn, such as a student register, a customer database or a list of addresses.
  • inferential statisticsMethods that use data from a sample to draw conclusions, with a measured level of uncertainty, about a larger population.
  • random sampleA sample chosen so that every member of the population has a known, usually equal, chance of being selected, which helps avoid systematic bias.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Sampling

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