Examples of population in the following topics:
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- Statistical inference makes claims about a population of individuals or things, using data drawn from a smaller subset of the population known as a sample.
- Statistical inference makes propositions about a population by using a sample, which is data drawn from that population.
- In this case, our population is all women over 30.
- A “sample” is a set of observations derived from a subset of a population.
- The corresponding values in the population are called parameters.
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- The smaller the sample size for an experiment, the less applicable the results will be to the general population.
- Generally it is best to attain a reasonable sample size that is representative of the population being studied.
- Sampling bias occurs when the sample participating in the study is not representative of the general population.
- The resulting data, however, is not representative of the desired sample, nor the population at large.
- Thus, the responses collected are biased and not representative of the general population of interest.
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- Populations that are Western, educated, and industrialized tend to be overrepresented in psychological research, yet findings from this research tend to be labeled "universal" and inaccurately applied to other cultures.
- The evidence that social values, logical reasoning, and basic cognitive and motivational processes vary across populations has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
- By studying only a narrow range of culture within human populations, psychologists fail to account for a substantial amount of diversity.
- Populations that are Western, educated, and industrialized tend to be overrepresented in psychological research.
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- Currently, IQ tests are used to study distributions in scores among specific populations.
- Standard deviation is a term for measuring how far a given score is from the mean; in any normal distribution, you can tell what percentage of a population will fall within a certain score range by looking at standard deviations.
- So by current measurement standards, 68% of people score between 85 and 115, 95% of the population score between 70 and 130 points, and over 99% of the population score between 55 and 145.
- IQ test scores tend to form a bell curve, with approximately 95% of the population scoring between two standard deviations of the mean score of 100.
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- Psychologists agree that intelligence differs among populations but disagree as to why this phenomenon exists.
- The variance of intelligence scores among individual human beings can be extrapolated to larger population differences in general intelligence and mental capacity.
- From the beginning of intellectual research, psychologists have attempted to rank individuals and populations on their respective intelligence scores.
- Test bias refers to the construct of the test itself as it is applied to different populations.
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- For example, the original MMPI was intended to be used in clinical populations, and the normative sample (or the sample of individuals whose scores are used as a baseline against which all test-takers' scores are compared) consisted of psychiatric patients.
- For a clinical population, this information can reveal what is normative for that particular population; however it limits the usage and application to other nonclinical populations.
- The MMPI-2 used a normative sample from within the general population that was thought to be representative of all major demographic variables, expanding its applicability.
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- Health psychology addresses individual and population-level issues across four domains: clinical, public, community, and critical (social justice).
- Public health psychology investigates potential causal links between psychosocial factors and health at the population level.
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- Recent discoveries have further complicated this debate by proving that the relationship between internal predispositions ("nature") and external circumstances ("nurture") not only varies among populations, but also changes over time.
- Heritability describes what percentage of the variation of a trait in a population is due to genetic differences in that population (as opposed to environmental factors).
- Twin studies in the western world have found the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8, meaning that the variance in intelligence among the population is 70%-80% due to genetics.
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- In 1939, David Wechsler published the first intelligence test explicitly designed for an adult population, known as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, or WAIS.
- Approximately 95% of the population scores between 70 and 130 points.
- In the normal population, g and IQ are roughly 90% correlated.
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- Self-report measures are used with both clinical and nonclinical populations and for a variety of reasons, from diagnostic purposes to helping with career guidance.
- The MBTI is one of the most popular personality inventories used with nonclinical populations; it has been criticized, however, for its lack of statistical validity and low reliability.
- The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is the most widely used personality inventory for both clinical and nonclinical populations, and is commonly used to help with the diagnosis of personality disorders.