ABSTRACT
I dream of the day when all Americans will have microchips implanted in their brains that will allow social scientists like me to poll all of their minds at any time whenever we want. On second thought, perhaps that dream would turn into a nightmare. Such information could be used for nefarious purposes by anyone, from marketing companies to politicians. But strictly from a social science standpoint, wouldn’t that be great? We could know at any time exactly what everyone in the population is thinking. The entire population! All 300,000,000-plus Americans! Until that day comes, however, we must rely on sampling. Instead of asking everyone in the population how he or she behaves or how he or she feels about issues, we ask a tiny sliver of them our questions. Then, using a variety of statistical techniques that are covered in this chapter and
subsequent chapters, we can take what we know about our sample and make educated claims, or inferences, about the population from which the sample was drawn.
