Statistical Inference for Apparent Populations
Richard A. Berk, Bruce Western, Robert E. Weiss · Sociological Methodology · 1995
It is common in sociological publications to find statistical inference applied to datasets that are not samples in the usual sense. For the substantive issues being addressed, the data on hand are all the data there are. No additional data could be collected, even in principle. In this paper, we call the complete set of all units comprising such datasets an apparent population. Consider the following examples.