This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on Web of Science (1)  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

EUGENE E. LEVITT, Ph.D.

AMA Arch Gen Psychiatry 1960;2(4):457-458.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

The recent article on statistics and scientific methods by Thorpe and Baker,¹ while generally sound, contains some arguments which could be misleading to the practitioner without formal experimental training. These arguments revolve around the meaning of the word "population" in research. A population is the total supply or "universe" of a particular kind of subject matter. Populations, like concepts, have to be defined operationally for experimental purposes.

The population definition ordinarily begins, "All the people who . . .," and it is usually taken for granted that the number will be quite large. This is not necessary in theory. The absolute size of "all" is relative. Populations are defined arbitrarily, depending upon the purposes of the individual experimenter or theorist. A population could be defined equally validly as "all the paranoid schizophrenics in the world at any given moment," or "all the paranoid schizophrenics who . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
Indianapolis

Indiana University Medical Center.

Footnotes
Submitted for publication Nov. 2, 1959.

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?