The statistical population It is the collective or complete set of elements with characteristics in common and that you want to study. These elements can be people, living beings, inanimate objects, events, attitudes towards an event and various businesses..
Examples of populations are the inhabitants of an entire country or city, the items produced by a factory after one day, or the number of stars in the Milky Way. Likewise, all the grades obtained by the students of a university at the end of the school term can be classified as a statistical population.
The researcher is the one who decides what are the characteristics of interest of the population to be studied. For this reason, the range of possibilities being so wide, populations are classified by some outstanding characteristic, such as their size..
This determines the most common way to classify statistical populations, such that populations, in general, are said to be infinite or finite. However, there are also other distinctive attributes, always from the point of view of the research to be carried out..
Such attributes are defined in advance to ensure that they satisfy the requirements of the study, and at the same time help the researcher to give the population the appropriate treatment..
Populations are generally studied through a carefully selected sample: this is a representative subset, the smaller size of which makes it easier to manage. By extension, the characteristics of the sample correspond to those of the population within a narrow margin, which the researcher establishes at convenience using statistical techniques..
In principle, there may be as many types of statistical populations as there are characteristics to be included in their definition, but there are some criteria that most researchers use to classify them and that are universally applicable..
It should also be noted that some populations easily fit more than one category listed below:
They are theoretical populations, since they contain an infinite amount of elements. However, some populations have so many elements that in practice they are considered infinite because the total is very difficult to determine..
-The set of real numbers.
-Number of oxygen atoms in the air in a room.
They have a limited number of components, and their number can be quite large or, on the contrary, small.
-The number of employees in a company.
-Total number of students in a country.
It refers to a group of elements whose existence is material or also to concrete observations about some event.
-The total number of blue whales that exist.
-The attitude of consumers towards a new product on the market.
In this category are observations about potential events and also psychological characteristics.
-The anxiety levels of a group of people before the possibility of a catastrophe.
These are populations whose characteristics are maintained in time and space, or do not vary significantly.
-The rotation period of the planets.
For their part, unstable populations have one or more variable characteristics, both in time and space..
-The set of people in a city that consumes a certain brand of soda is an example of an unstable population, since preferences can change in a short term, if another product with more striking characteristics appears (a competitor brand that is on sale or that it is presented with a new color or flavor ...).
They are linked to one or more characteristics and therefore may vary when they change, either totally or partially..
-Sales of products with populations that depend, among other factors, on the investment made in advertising.
In this population we seek to determine the presence or absence of a certain characteristic.
-In studies on the chemistry of mineral water for human consumption, it is common to indicate the presence of some compound, such as sodium chloride or calcium carbonate.
In polynomial populations it is intended to carry out the measurement of a set of characteristics.
-Age, height and weight of students in a basic school.
In these populations there are changes due to chance or circumstances beyond human control.
-There are industrial processes in which unforeseen variations affect the quality of the final products. If during a week of thunderstorms there were power failures, which affected a cardboard cup factory, the production of that week may not be of the same quality as the regular production.
Below is an illustrative list of populations of the different types that can occur in many areas. It is important to emphasize again that the same population can belong to more than one of the types described, because it has characteristics in common with them..
- The total cat population of a country (real and infinite population).
- Water molecules in the Atlantic Ocean (it is a real and infinite population, since it contains such a quantity of elements that in practice it is impossible to totalize them).
- All viruses present on Earth (real and infinite population).
- Number of preterm births during the next trimester (hypothetical population, since the births have not yet occurred, and it is also finite).
- Number of animals affected in the next dry season by possible forest fires (hypothetical and finite population).
- Number of stars in the core of the Milky Way (finite and stable population, since the number of stars remains constant for a long time and is also real).
-The set of all prime numbers (infinite, stable, and real population).
- Cholesterol levels in the population of European Union countries (finite, dependent, real, unstable population).
- Number of survivors in the event of a Vesuvius eruption (hypothetical population, finite, unstable).
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