Question

1.  describe the standard error of the mean.

2. describe the difference between the standard deviation and the standard error of the mean.

3. What is are the symbols for the standard deviation and the standard error of the mean (SE or SEM)?    

4.  What is sampling error?

5.  What is the law of large numbers?  

Answer 1

1)

The standard error (SE) of a statistic is the standard deviation of its sampling distribution if the parameter or the statistic is the mean, it is called the standard error of the mean (SEM).

The standard error of the mean is designated as σ_M. It is the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of the mean.

2)

The standard deviation (SD) measures how much variation exists for a subject set of data from the mean, while the standard error of the mean (SEM) measures how far the sample mean of the data is likely to be from the true population mean. The SEM is always smaller than the SD.

3)

The symbols for the standard deviation and the standard error of the mean can be represented as:

4)

Sampling error occurs when researchers take a random sample instead of observing every individual subject that represents a population.