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each of these situations a sample is used to
give information about the much larger population.
Samples are used to save time and money.
For example, it is only in
a General Election that every voter gets the chance to vote, yet the outcome
is often surprisingly accurately predicted by opinion polls which typically
ask less than 2000 people their voting intention.
How are samples chosen? How
accurate are they in predicting the behaviour of the population? What
can be done to improve their accuracy? What is a confidence interval confident
about? These are some of the topics covered by 'Sampling and Estimation'
and by the 'Sampling Methods' module.
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