Chapter 7--Distribution of Sample Means

Expected value of M

mean of the distribution of sample means; average of the M values

Distribution of sample means

set of sample means from all the possible random samples for a specific sample size (n) from a specific population

Sampling distribution

distribution of statistics (as opposed to a distribution of scores); the distribution of sample means is an example of a sampling distribution

Central limit theorem

for any population with mean μ and standard deviation σ, the distribution of sample means for sample size n will have a mean of μ and a standard deviation of σ/square of n and will approach a perfect mean as n approaches infinity

standard error of M

standard devidation of the distribution of sample means; standard deviation between a sample mean and the population mean

Expected value of M

the mean of the distribution of sample means is equal to the mean of the population of scores; a sample mean is expected to be near its population mean