Table of Contents |
In a sampling distribution, the center is the same as the center of the original distribution. That is to say, the mean of all the x-bar averages is the same as the mean of the original distribution. The shape is also a characteristic of distributions and will be discussed in the next section.
The spread, or standard deviation, is the same as the original standard deviation divided by the square root of sample size. In other words, the standard deviation of all the x-bars is equal to the original standard deviation divided by the square root of n (n being the sample size).
These two characteristics are notated like this:
Consider this spinner:
Consider the sampling distributions caused by averaging different numbers of spins. Well, it's fairly obvious that if you spun it once, you would spin a one about 3 out of 8 times. You'd spin a two about 1 out of 8 times, a three about 2 out of 8 times, and a four about 2 out of 8 times, making the distribution look something like this:
You can see here that one is the most common, three and four are the next most common (and equally common), and two is the least common.
What about the sampling distributions if you averaged four spins? Well, you wouldn't just have options of 1, 2, 3, and 4 anymore. You'd have options of 1.25, 1.5, 1.75 , 2, 2.25, 2.5, etc. Having more options would necessarily decrease the likelihood of getting all 1's or all 4's. The distribution would look something like this:
Getting all four 1's would be extremely unlikely, and getting all four 4's would also be extremely unlikely. The most likely scenario is getting 2.25. There are a few more 1's than there are anything else, which pulls the mean down a little bit from where you might have thought it would be: 2.3. This distribution is slightly skewed to the right.
What if you sampled nine and averaged nine spins? Well, the probability, for instance, that you get all 1's, therefore averaging a 1, goes down even further. Also, the probability that you get all 4's goes down to almost zero:
As this graph shows, it's possible to get all 1's, but it’s not very likely. It's a lot more common to get something between 2 and 3. The spread of the sampling distribution is decreasing as n gets bigger. As the previous graphs show, the shape of the distribution changes as the number of spins, n, changes.
Suppose you are averaging 20 spins. It's almost impossible to average a 1, a 4, or even something close to 3. You're almost guaranteed to average something between 2 and 3. The spread, again, is decreasing.
The Central Limit Theorem deals with the changes in shape that we saw above; it discusses the shape of a sampling distribution. The Central Limit Theorem states that when the sample size is large, the shape of the sampling distribution of means becomes nearly normal.
The definition of “large” will be different depending on what the original distribution looked like. Our original distribution was almost uniform, so it didn't take very many trials. If the distribution had been heavily skewed, it would have taken more trials to average out some of those high numbers with some of those low numbers.
In most cases, 30 is going to be a good sample size such that when you average the 30 observations, you are going to get something close to what you expect. With a sample size of 30, the distributions that are off from what you expect will tail off in a normal shape.
Source: THIS TUTORIAL WAS AUTHORED BY JONATHAN OSTERS FOR SOPHIA LEARNING. PLEASE SEE OUR TERMS OF USE.