Video Transcript
A study claims that 96 percent of
people aged 16 to 24 in a certain country own a smart phone. Is this a sample statistic or a
population characteristic?
We recall that a population
includes all the elements from a data set. In this question, this would be all
the people aged 16 to 24 in a country. A sample, on the other hand,
consists of one or more observations drawn from the population. Due to the constraints of time and
money, it would be very difficult to ask every 16- to 24-year-old in a country. Typically, this would only happen
when conducting a census. This means that the 96 percent that
the study claims must be based on a sample of the population. The correct answer is therefore a
sample statistic.
Any study of this type will not be
able to ask the entire population but instead will focus on a sample. This sample could have been
obtained using a variety of methods. Random sampling, systematic
sampling, or stratified sampling are examples of this.
