You ask a sample of 8 neighbors how much they spent the last time they went out for dinner, and find the mean cost. Let’s say you want to find the average amount people spend on a restaurant meal in your neighborhood.
We’ll walk through these steps with a sample data set. There are two steps for calculating the mean: The sample mean is also referred to as M. The population mean can also be denoted as μ. Population attributes use capital letters while sample attributes use lowercase letters. The formulas for the sample mean and the population mean only differ in mathematical notation. In research, you often collect data from samples and perform inferential statistics to understand the population they came from. Proofread my paper Mean formulas for populations and samples