Sampling and Reality

Abstract

At the beginning of Chapter 7, I asserted that sampling was at the very heart of the statistical principles applied in this book. I hope the chapters that lie between there and here have made clearer just what that means. Whether the task is estimating the population mean or proportion, comparing means in several batches, comparing proportions in several batches, or investigating the relationship between two measurements, the logic of the approaches statisticians take involves thinking about the batches of numbers we are working with as samples from a larger population. It is this larger population that really interests us.