Define the theoretical and accessible populations and explain how they are related

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The group you wish to generalize to is called the population in your study. This is the group you would like to sample from because this is the group you ultimately want your results to be about. Let's imagine that you want to generalize to urban homeless males between the ages of thirty and fifty in the United States. If that is the population of interest, you are likely to have a hard time developing a reasonable sampling plan. You are probably not going to find an accurate listing of this population, and even if you did, you would almost certainly not be able to mount a national sample across hundreds of urban areas. So you probably should make a distinction between the population you would like to generalize to, and the population that is accessible to you. Let's call the former the theoretical population and the latter the accessible population. For instance, if your theoretical population is all homeless males between the ages of thirty and fifty in the United States, an accessible population might be all identifiable homeless males between the ages of thirty and fifty in six selected urban areas across the United States.