Populations and Sampling

Populations and sampling are key issues in survey research. A population refers to all of the units in a set; if a survey wants to examine what Americans think, every single person in the United States becomes a unit of that dataset. The larger the population becomes, the more likely social scientists are to use a sample, otherwise known as a subset, of that population to survey.  This learning module explains and examines random sampling using the ARDA’s archive of open-source datasets.