Collecting data is much more than knocking on doors and polling people. To get accurate data that is a good representation of the public, you would ideally poll everyone in the population. Since it's nearly impossible to ask millions and millions of people questions, the best solution would be to poll a random sample group and then determine from them how everyone else might answer. In statistics, a sample is a subset of a population. It represents a subset of manageable size that one can use to make inferences from the sample to the population. Sampling is not perfect, but when utilized correctly, it can be a powerful tool to learn more about any population.
In today's free 7th grade math video, we cover Populations and Samples. Professor Edward Burger demonstrates different ways of sampling groups and how to determine if the sample is a good representation of the population or if it is a biased sampling. There are a total of three lectures on the video, so make certain you click on the forward button directly to the left of the timestamp to move to the next lecture in the series.
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