Almost always, if not always, simple statistics are used to obtain a better understanding of a population of interest. A population is the set of all units of interest. Parameters are quantities that represent the population. The parameters of interest are estimated using statistics. If you were interested in all the people in Bangkok, then the population would consist of all people in Bangkok. The sample is a subset of the population. Sampling will be discussed in further detail in Chapter 5Introduction to Sampling and Sampling Distribution.
The population quantities for the proportion, mean, finite population variance and the standard deviation are
and
respectively. Where capital N refers the number of units in the population.