ABSTRACT
Throughout the earlier chapters the phrase populations of interest has been used to point to the fact that many of the indices and parameters dealt with are accidental parameters of the population sampled. Every respondent can be classified as belonging to an indefinite number of populations. There is that most obvious identification of individuals by gender. There are less obvious but commonly employed classifications (by self or imposed by others) in terms of “ethnic group”—those complex results of some thousands of years of cultural and political history marked by expansion, invasion, infiltration, conflict, and conquest across the surface of our planet that may give different citizens of a modern nation-state a chosen or imposed identity distinct from their citizenship. There are attempted classifications by “race,” from the infamous imposed classifications that have marked segregationist societies to identities chosen by members of a disempowered group for whom racial pride may function positively in a movement toward empowerment. There are possible classifications on such cultural bases as religion, and classifications by socioeconomic status or educational level. Ever finer classifications can be obtained if we select groups by their score on one test to study their responses to others, until the individual is the intersection of so many properties that the individual is a population containing just one member.
