SOLUTION: At a corporation, the mean salary for all employees is $32,500. Does the mean salary represent a parameter or a statistic?

Question 1160674: At a corporation, the mean salary for all employees is $32,500. Does the mean salary represent a parameter or a statistic?
Answer by jim_thompson5910(35256) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!

It depends on how you want to define the population. If all you care about are the employees at this particular company, and nowhere else, then you'd be talking about a parameter since the population would be all the employees at this company. If your sample is the same as your population, then you are conducting a census. It's fairly easy to do a census on entire-wide company payroll data because those values would be on file somewhere already.

However, if you want to expand the population to include every worker (either in general or in this particular industry) in the country, then we are now talking about a statistic. A statistic measures a sample, such as a sample mean or sample standard deviation. A parameter is a measure of the population (eg: population mean, population variance, etc etc). The sample is only an unbiased estimate of the population if you conduct proper sampling techniques with minimized to no bias as possible.

A good way to remember the pairings: 'sample' and 'statistic' start with the same letter 's'. The same happens with 'population' and 'parameter'.

In my opinion, this problem isn't clear enough. I would ask your teacher for clarification.

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