# Sampling & Sampling Validity

Psychologists are trying to understand how the mind works. One way of doing this would be to conduct their experiments on every single person alive, to produce an overall description of the human race and how it thinks. Clearly, this would be impossible.

Instead, psychologists conduct their research on just a small selection of the available people. This is done on the assumption that what is found out from the small selection of people will be equally true of the larger group from which they were drawn.

The larger group of people we want to know about is called the population. The small group of people we actually use in the research is called the sample. We want to be able to generalise from the sample to the population.

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Basic level content | Start | Digit span measures of STM | Recency measures of STM | Test your learning
Intermediate level content |  | Research using digit span measures | Research using recency measures |
Advanced level content |  | Ecological validity and STM research | Sampling validity and STM research |