What is the distribution of the sample means?

• For any given population it can often be difficult or impractical to find the true value of the?population mean,?μ
  • The population could be too large to collect data using a census or
  • Collecting the data could compromise the individual data values and therefore taking a census could destroy the population
  • Instead, the population mean can be estimated by taking the mean from a sample from within the population
• The standard deviation of the distribution of the sample means depends on the sample size,?n
  • It is inversely proportional to the square root of the sample size
  • This means that the greater the sample size, the smaller the value of the standard deviation and the narrower the distribution of the sample means