Population Definition in Statistics and How to Measure It

What is Population in Statistics?

A population is the whole set of individuals in a group, whether that group is a country or a collection of people who share a certain trait.

A population is the group of people from which a statistical sample is taken in statistics. Therefore, a population is any collection of people who have something in common. A statistically substantial subset of a population, rather than the complete population, may be referred to as an example or sample. In addition to this, a statistical analysis of a sample needs to provide an estimate of the standard deviation, or the standard error, of its findings from the total population. Only a whole or complete population analysis would have zero standard error.

Understanding Population in Statistics

The term "population" typically refers to a group of individuals or, at the bare minimum, a collection of living things. However, statisticians use the term "population" to describe the group they are examining or researching. The population of research could consist of newborns in a nation in 2021, all tech firms founded in a country since 2000, the average height of all applicants for accounting examinations, the mean weight of taxpayers in that nation, etc. There can be many instances.

To make the most accurate conclusions possible, statisticians & researchers prefer to be knowledgeable of all the features of each subject in a population. However, this is difficult or impracticable because population sets are frequently rather big.

For instance, it would be impossible to call each customer to perform a survey if a business wanted to determine whether the majority of its 100,000 customers were happy with the company's service in the previous year. Since it would be impossible to measure every population member's attributes due to time, resource, and accessibility limitations, a population sample must be collected with a fewer number of customers.

How to measure/ calculate a Population?

The number of businesses that failed in a country under three years, the average height of all male accounting test participants, or the average weight of all taxpayers over 30 years of age are a few examples of populations that can be precisely characterised. The science of political polling provides a good illustration of how challenging it is to choose a random sample of the population. For example, the fact that the types of individuals who freely answer polling questions may not always comprise a random sample of the population as potential voters. This may be one reason why multiple polls are usually inaccurate.

However, polls and surveys may be the sole effective method for identifying and validating problems and patterns that have an impact on a larger population. For instance, internet harassment is a subject that has received increasing attention, but how prevalent is it? A Research study may indicate that 11% of respondents reported being stalked, 14% said they had received physical threats online, and 41% of adults claimed to have encountered online harassment. Although the statistical population concept is not entirely accurate, it gives an idea conceptually of certain outcomes.

Samples vs. the Population

A sample is a representative group of a population chosen at random. It is a smaller subset selected from the population and possesses all of its traits. Observations and inferences drawn from sample data are applied or followed on the basis of considering the entire population.

Statisticians can construct hypotheses about a bigger population using the data from the statistical sample. The population is typically represented in statistical equations by a capital 'N', while a lowercase 'n' typically represents the sample. There are various techniques for taking samples from a population, often termed sampling. These consist of convenience sampling, representative sampling, stratified sampling, and a simple random sample.

Using only the selected smaller sample, analysts and researchers use a variety of statistical approaches to draw conclusions about the larger population. It should be noted that sample size is a crucial consideration when making such inferences; if the sample size is too small, it may be biased and unreliable, while bigger samples may be excessively costly and time-consuming to gather and analyse but considerably more accurate.

The Meaning of Population in Demographic Terms

While the population can be used to refer to any dataset in a statistical sense, it has a different meaning when used in a geopolitical or demographic context. In this context, the term "population" refers to all people living in a considered area, such as a city, nation, or even the entire world. Census counts keep track of the total number of residents in each county and information about their age, race, gender, income, profession, and other basic characteristics. Population counts are crucial for governments to collect taxes and distribute the right amount of money for different infrastructure and social projects.

Demography studies populations, their features, and how they vary over time and from area to area. Public policy and business decisions are influenced by demography and population statistics accordingly.