"Determine whether the data set is a population or a sample. E...

Question

"Determine whether the data set is a population or a sample. Explain your reasoning.

A survey of 250 members from an organized union of over 20,000 members"

Accepted Answer

Hello there. Today we're gonna solve the following practice problem together. So first off, let us read the problem and highlight all the key pieces of information that we need to use in order to solve this problem. A researcher collected responses from 180 employees at a manufacturing company to assess job satisfaction. The company has a total of over 3500 employees. Is this data set a population or a sample? Explain your reasoning. Awesome. So it appears for this particular prom we're asked to determine whether or not all the information that is provided to us by the prom itself. Is this data set considered a population or a sample, and we're asked to explain our reasoning. So now that we know what we're ultimately trying to solve for, let's read off our multiple choice answers to see what our final answer might be. A is population because the survey was large enough to represent everyone. B is sample because the group included every possible participant. C is population because all relevant opinions were gathered, and D is sample because the data was collected from a portion of the overall group. Awesome. So to solve for this problem, we need to note and recall that we need to determine whether this data set is a population or a sample. And in order to do that, we must first understand the definition of each. So let us recall that a population is the entire group that we want information about what we want to collect information about. So once again, a population includes the entire group that we want to collect information about, whereas a sample, as we should recall, is a subset of the population, which is used to make conclusions about the population. So with that in mind, focusing on this particular problem individually. We are told that the population is all 3,500+ employees at the company, and we're told that the researcher only gathered data from 180 employees, not all of them. So that is key. So they're only collected responses from 180 employees, not the total of over 3500 employees. So with that in mind, Since the researcher did not collect data from every individual but rather only collected data from part of the total group, the data set therefore will represent a sample. So in conclusion, the data set is a sample because it only includes part of the full group of employees at the company. Which will mean our final answer without a doubt will have to be multiple choice answer letter D, which once again is sample because the data was collected from a portion of the overall group, and that's it. That is our final answer. Thank you so much for watching. Hopefully that helped, and I can't wait to see you in the next video. Bye.

"Determine whether the data set is a population or a sample. Explain your reasoning.
A survey of 250 members from an organized union of over 20,000 members"

Key Concepts

Population

Sample

Sampling Method

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