ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with using samples to provide information about the wider population from which they are drawn. The first three sections consider the issues involved in making inferences about the population mean and standard deviation and subsequent sections discuss the reliability of such inferences. The terms sample and population are used precisely as defined in Chapter 10 and it is assumed throughout that where a sample is referred to, it is a ‘random sample’. The importance of this cannot be overstated. Some powerful procedures are derived which can be of great help in the furtherance of knowledge-but applied in inappropriate circumstances they can be misleading or dangerous.
