Research Concepts

Population

The population is the the entire collection of persons (or animals, or objects or other things) from which your research team might collect data. The population is the entire group you will be studying, whether or not you actually collect data on each individual. Ultimately you will use the data you collect to draw conclusions about your population.

For example, suppose you are studying the length of time it takes a graduate student in Human Relations to earn their degree. Then your population might be all students who graduated from OU with a Master of Human Relations since the degree was created.

The notion of what constitutes a "Master of Human Relations" has evolved over time and OU degree equirements have changed in response. Another study might consider only those students who earned their degree and were admitted after 1988, the last major revision to degree requirements. This is a smaller population.

Instead of narrowing the definition of population, we might broaden it to include students graduating from other institutions offering the Master of Human Relations degree.

The population is the group you will study. You want to be able to draw conclusions about the population. None of the three possible "populations" above are necessarily better or worse than another: each does, however, lead to a slightly different set of possible conclusions. There is a connection between your research objectives and the definition of your population. In particular the scope of your conclusions will be determined in part by the definition of your population.

Since you are measuring the time it takes to graduate, everyone in yourpopulation must have graduated! The proposed question

"How long does it take a graduate student in Human relations to earn their degree?"

presumes that you can measure the time to degree, i.e., that everyone in your population did in fact earn a degree. A different study might consider the retention rate for students admitted to the graduate program in Human Relations. The population for this study might include all admitted students, whether or not they graduate.

Sometimes your research will involve two or more populations. One will have been exposed to some experimental treatment or procedure and another will have been exposed to a different procedure, or no treatment at all. This kind of study involves an experiment.