ABSTRACT
In the book so far we have been looking at what we call populations, that is the complete set of the things we are interested in. The frequency distributions have included all the scores we are interested in, such as the scores of all one hundred students who took the examination this year, the example from Chapter 2. A population need not be a collection of people, even though we are used to hearing the term used in this way, such as the population of Britain. A population can be a complete set of anything. In statistics it refers to a complete set of scores, such as the number of pages of each book in a library, the IQ scores of fifteen year old girls living in London, the number of goals scored in each football league match on a particular Saturday, the times to complete a jigsaw by members of the Robinson family, the number of food pellets eaten by each rat in an animal learning experiment. The population is simply every member of the particular category we wish to study.
