Sampling Variability

Statistics · Axiom Academy

Discover why different samples give different results! Here's a population of 100 people. Each person is either Male () or Female (). In this population, exactly 60% are female . Instead of surveying all 100 people (expensive and time-consuming!), let's randomly select just 10 people as our sample. Let's see what happens when we take many different samples from the same population. Click the button multiple times! Let's take many samples automatically and see the distribution of results! Different random samples from the same population give different results. This variation is natural and expected - it's not an error! In real research, we only have ONE sample. Understanding sampling variability helps us know how much our sample result might differ from the true population value. Even with the same sample size (n=10) and the same population, each sample gives a different proportion. The results tend to cluster around the true value, but there's natural variation. You'll learn how to quantify this variability and make inferences about populations based on just one sample!

This is the written version of the interactive lesson above. See the full Statistics course.