Question

Please provide example not already posted, thank you!

Unit 5 Discussion: Sampling Distributions Why are sampling distributions important to the study of inferential statistics? In your answer, demonstrate your understanding by providing an example of a sampling distribution from an area such as business, sports, medicine, social science, or another area with which you are familiar. Remember to cite your resources and use your own words in your explanation

Answer 1

A sampling distribution is important to the study of inferential statistic because in most of the practical cases, its nearly impossible to study the whole population. So, we need to perform sampling several times and study the variable of interest in those samples and then use sampling distribution to make an inference about the population.

For example, let's consider the situation of ongoing pandemic. Lets say we want to study the proportion of different age groups succumbing to death after being infected. This is a very useful research question as many doctors and researchers are trying to relate the effect of covid-19 virus to different age groups so that different plan of action can be taken for different age groups if required.

Now, to estimate these proportions, its not possible to gather the data of everyone in world who have succumbed to death after being infected by Covid-19 virus. Due to the advancement of science, we have access to data of number of total deaths in different countries on various online portals, but still they are not advanced enough to give us the data grouped by age.

So, we can estimate these proportions based on sampling distribution. Let's say we at least have data of your own state say 'Texas'. Let's say, you have 250 hospitals in the Texas dealing with covid-19 patients. You randomly choose 30 of them by some random sampling technique or may be by using stratified sampling method. And then you collect the data from these hospitals for the number of infected patients by age group and the number of them who succembed to death in these age groups. Then for each age group, you will have 30 different sample proportions and that would be good enough to estimate the population proportion of fatalities in these age groups.

A typical distribution of age groups being used by researchers is: 0-17 yrs, 18-40 yrs, 41-60 yrs, 60-75 yrs and above 75 years.

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