From the course: SPSS for Academic Research

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Estimate the population mean

Estimate the population mean - SPSS Statistics Tutorial

From the course: SPSS for Academic Research

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Estimate the population mean

- [Instructor] Let's think about the sample one more time and how we can use it. Remember, it's really difficult for us to get the mean of the entire population just from gathering data. We have to make inferences. That's why this field is called inferential statistics. To do that, we can assume that our sample's mean given that we followed our rules about sampling is a pretty good approximation of the true population's mean but that's exactly what it is, an approximation, an estimate. We can't be 100% confident that our sample mean matches that of our population. What we can do however is build out a confidence interval around our sample mean. This confidence interval basically states how confident we are in the range that we provide around a sample mean. The confidence interval depends on three things, the sample mean itself, the standard deviation and the sample size. For example, recall that our sample mean for women's heights is 64 inches. Without doing any math, we could say…

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