# Sampling & Sampling Validity

A population can potentially consist of many different types of people. For example, the population of the UK contains:

- Women and men
- Different age groups
- Different social and ethnic backgrounds
- Different educational backgrounds

and so on. In order to be able to generalise from any sample we took to the UK population, we would need to ensure that all these different types of people we present in the sample. In other words, we would need to be sure that the sample was representative.

If the sample was unrepresentative, they we could not be completely confident that what we found out from the sample was also true of the population. That is, our study would lack sampling validity.

If a study's sampling validity is low, then the findings are of limited use, because they will apply to a smaller section of the population than we actually wanted to know about.

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Intermediate level content |  | Research using digit span measures | Research using recency measures |
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