In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Tim Witort <trw7atixdotnetcomdotcom> wrote:
>I'm developing a report in an analysis program. >This report examines employee salaries - comparing >the salaries of men to those of women in a particular >job title in a particular company. The goal is to >determine if the difference in their mean salaries >is statistically significant. > >I have been directed to the t-test to gather this >information. When I look at the t-test, however, >it appears to be geared toward *estimating* the >difference in the means of a population based on >a *sample* of the population. Since I am using >the entire population, can I still use the t-test >to determine if the difference in the means is >statistically significant? Yes, because the "population" you are presumably interested in is not the population of actual current employees, but rather the population of possible employees and their salaries that would hypothetically result from continued appliation of the company's current employment and promotion policies into the indefinite future. Only by making inferences about that hypothetical population can you conclude anything about the nature of these policies. Radford Neal ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Radford M. Neal [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dept. of Statistics and Dept. of Computer Science [EMAIL PROTECTED] University of Toronto http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
