Confused about Population distribution, Sample distribution and Sampling distribution?

Starting with statistics?! you must have came accross terms population distribution, sample distribution and sampling distribution. Still confused?? Well, I could try to help you understand :-)

So, suppose you have to conduct a survey of average height of human being or results of an election or review of any product in a particular state.

So, if you are sincere, dedicated and extremely hardworking person then uh would go to each and every single person who lives in that state and ask them their height or about their vote or their views. And will note that and calculate the mean of data obtained.

And if you are not sincere and very lazy person like me :-P , you would randomly choose n number of people from different areas and ask them same questions and make assumption for whole state based on that result.

And if you are a creative thinker l, you would ask multiple different sets of people in order to get accurate results.

You would randomly choose total n number of people from all over the state who can belong to same or different area of that state and ask them same questions and would finally calculate and note down mean of the results.

After that, you will again repeat same process and note down the means and will continue this process n times such that you have n number of means with you.

Now, this was all population distribution, sample distribution and sampling distribution.

Let’s consider first person’s data that is called as population and plot them on a sheet then that distribution is called population distribution. It’s also theoretical as it’s impractical to collect that amount of data.

Also, mean(average) of this data is known as population mean.

Now, data collected by second person is known as sample data. And distribution of this data is known as sample distribution.

And, calculated mean of this data is known as sample mean.

And finally there is this person who has n means with him. Since this person chooses n number of people in every process can we say that this person has different sample data in every process?! Yes, so this person has n number of samples and their means with him.

Now if we plot these means of n different samples, we’ll get sampling distribution of mean. You can think as means of different samples are being distributed.

Average of these means can also be calculated and that is equal to population mean (According to Central Limit Theorem).

With this, I guess I got you something to look forward to. And I hope I was able to help you understand these concepts.