Title:	Statistical Research Methods
Authors:	Roy Sabo Edward Boone
Keywords:	Statistical
Issue Date:	2013
Publisher:	Springer
Description:	The impetus for conducting research which utilizes statistical analyses is the desire to better understand some population of interest. A population is defined as the totality of any group of subjects sharing some characteristic(s). The characteristics that such groups of subjects share can be generally defined (e.g. nationality, ethnicity, gender) or specifically defined (e.g. low-income patients under 40 years of age with type II diabetes). Researchers typically study such populations because some feature of that group is unknown or under question (e.g. what is the success rate of patients surviving a particular treatment for a particular disease). Though the research focus is on the population level, the use of an entire population is impractical for many reasons, each of which can be summarized in one word: resources. The resources needed to measure or examine the members of a population include money for research materials (drugs, laboratory space, recruitment, etc.) and the time needed to conduct the study. If a population is too large, then a great deal of money is needed to examine every subject within that population. Likewise, if members of a population are spread over a large area (e.g. the contiguous U.S.), the money and time required to reach them all will again be great. Importantly, the resources available to conduct research are usually constrained by factors external to the research. For instance, federal or industrial agencies sponsoring such research only have so much funding to offer, so population-level studies are usually out of the question. In other cases, such as in drug development, it would be unwise to test new treatments on large populations of subjects, especially when the risks of such treatments are severe or unknown.Due to constrained resources, studies focus on subgroups of populations, which we refer to as samples. Samples are – by definition – smaller than the populations from which they are drawn and are thus more manageable, both from a resource-expenditure point of view as well as a conduct-of-research point of view. In sampling from a population we hope to capture the characteristics of the entire population in the smaller sample. For instance, if 57% of all undergraduate college students throughout the U.S. are female (and 43% male), then we would hope that a smaller sample drawn from this population would maintain a similar gender breakdown.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/52553
ISBN:	978-1-4614-8708-1
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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