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statistics question
(i've tried google, no luck, I find dis is normally more helpful though probably not on a sunday here goes)
Anyone know how to interpret a data set when you have the entire population (not in the normal sense but in the sense of having everyone in the group you are looking at) rather than a sample. Like say you do a crosstabs of two variables, use chi-square to see if there is an association between them, then normally you get a significance that tells you the chance of this association randomly occuring in a sample by chance if it doesnt really exist in the whole population, but how do you interpret it if you do have all of the population in the data set. I really want to know how it applies to logistic regression models, normally you find out the effects of each variable and eliminate the insignificant ones, but eliminating something because theres too big a chance it might not be real in the population seems wrong if you have the entire population in the dataset, do you just pretend it is a sample?