Business Statistics Made Easy in SAS

Brief Introduction to Samples, Populations & Data

Initial Concepts

When you do a statistical analysis, you are gathering and analyzing information about things – specifically you generally gather information on a certain set of issues about some group of objects:

• Group of objects (observations): We usually study some group of objects, such as a group of people (perhaps consumers, employees, hospital patients), companies (such as all the company customers of Accu-Phi in the central textbook example), countries (perhaps all the South American countries), and the like. We want our analysis to reflect accurately and usefully on this group of objects. We call the group of objects observations.
• Set of issues (constructs & variables): ...