Sample Proportions
Definition
Sample proportions refer to the proportion or percentage of a specific characteristic or outcome within a sample. It is calculated by dividing the number of individuals with that characteristic by the total number of individuals in the sample.
Analogy
Imagine you have a bag of 100 candies, and you want to know what proportion are red. You randomly select 20 candies from the bag and find that 5 of them are red. The sample proportion of red candies would be 5/20 = 0.25, or 25%.
Related terms
Population Proportions: Population proportions are similar to sample proportions but refer to the proportion or percentage of a specific characteristic or outcome within an entire population rather than just a sample.
Sampling Distribution: A sampling distribution is a theoretical distribution that shows all possible values for a statistic (such as sample proportions) when repeated samples are taken from the same population.
Margin of Error: The margin of error is an estimate of how much the sample proportion may differ from the true population proportion. It takes into account variability in sampling and provides a range within which we can be confident our estimate falls.
"Sample Proportions" appears in:
Study guides (3)
Practice Questions (4)
What are the right conditions to determine that a sample distribution are roughly normal for the sampling distribution of the difference in sample proportions?
What is the center of the sampling distribution(B - A) for the difference in sample proportions if the true population proportions of City A and City B are 0.6 and 0.7?
You take simple random samples of 1200 people from City X and 900 people from City Y. The results show that 480 people from City X own a pet, and 315 people from City Y own a pet. What is the difference in sample proportions of people who own a pet in City X and City Y?
In a sampling distribution for differences in sample proportions, what will happen to the standard deviation if the sample sizes are increased?
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