Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Post 3 12/8
For the last post of the semester, I found something from Chapter 14 which seemed useful, which is the concept of generalizations. According to Epstein, generalizing involves concluding "a claim about a group, the population, from a claim about some part of it, the sample" (280). For example, here is a generalization that can correspond to the current issue of college athletes getting paid to play college sports: Of the college athletes that were interviewed, 55 percent said that they were paid to go to the college which they attend in order to play sports. So about 55 percent of all college athletes get paid to play sports for their school. In this argument, the sample is the group of student athletes who were interviewed, and the population is all college athletes. Because the same proportion of the whole as in the sample will have the property, this is a sample of a statistical generalization.
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The concept of generalizations was something I found useful as well. I found that when reading the chapter on generalizations, I couldn’t help but think about how common the concept is. I hear and probably use generalizations a lot more than I think on a daily basis. Personally, I think that generalizations are so commonly used because people have become very familiar with generalizations and often don’t feel the need to specify anything that they saw. With something like statistical generalizations, I feel that it is even more difficult to specify because the numbers make it seem like fact rather than a generalization or something that needs more specification.
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