Chapter 14

After reading chapter 14 of Epstein, I found several of the concepts about generalizing to be quite interesting.  One of the concepts about this chapter that I thought  that was most interesting was representative sample.  According to Epstein, it’s define as, “A sample is representative if no one subgroup of the whole population is represented more than its proportion in the population. A sample is biased if it not representative.” It was confusing at first but I think that there a better way to explain this. Here is an example:  Let say that there are a bunch of rabbits and you are researcher who is studying about rabbits. In a representative sample you have to make sure that those rabbits you are studying represent the whole population of rabbits in the world.  I also found haphazard sampling and random sampling to be amusing.  Haphazard sampling may contain a representative sample although you might not have any good reason to believe that it’s representative.  So, there could be lots of ways for the sample to be bias. As for random sampling, let say that you are picking one member from a group, each of those members of that group have an equal chance of being picked randomly.  Therefore it’s unlikely for the sample to be bias.