Day 10
Study Design: Generalizability

EPSY 5261 : Introductory Statistical Methods

Learning Goals

At the end of this lesson, you should be able to …

• Describe the benefits of obtaining a random sample.

Generalizing from a Study

How did we collect our sample?

• Ideally we want to generalize results from our population to more people than just our sample.
• How we collected our sample might affect our results.
  • Example: Sample people in the library about how much they study → might not generalize to the whole campus

Bias

• How we sample might bias our results (we could under or over predict).
• The least biased way to collect a sample is via random sampling.
• You will explore this in an activity!

Sampling Countries Activity

Can You Generalize?

Summary

• Random samples provide unbiased estimates for the population.
• This allows us to generalize our findings from our sample to the population the sample was draw from.