Question

A researcher wants to know how undergraduate college students at her university feel about federal financial aid. She obtains a list of 1196 undergraduate college students at her university, selects 500 of them at random, and emails a questionnaire to them. 107 questionnaires are returned. Of these, 71% stated that they believe that the federal student loan program needs to be completely overhauled. Classify the following groups as the population or the sample for this particular study. If a group does not belong in either category, leave it unplaced.

Answer 1

The group she made is the Sample.

Here Population is the all students of undergraduate college at her university.

Whereas the selected 1196 undergraduate college students at her university as well as randomly selected 500 students are Sample.

Further,

The sample is a subset of the population and it is easy to analyze as compared to the population.

The sample is said to be representative if it represents the whole population.