A population refers to a group that has something in common and is of some interest to us. A population may be theoretical and most statistical use of the word is about theoretical populations: the population of all possible people who might ever come for therapy. A population may also be real: the people who did come to a service in particular period from which a sample might have been taken at random to look at, say, recording of a particular phenomenon in the notes.
Details #
Real populations are always finite not infinite and, where the size drops down this may make statistical methods based on the assumption of infinite populations misleading and for some statistical methods there are extensions that adjust to the known population size. Where a set of notes might have been sampled from say 43 people who attended over six months say, then using infinite population models can be quite misleading.
Try also … #
Sample
Estimation
Confidence intervals
Hypothesis testing
Dataset
Census
Chapters #
Nothing here yet!
Online applications #
Might add calculators handling finite population data? Not a high priority!
