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Article: Surveys
- Article from:
- Encyclopedia of Public Health
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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SURVEYS
The word "survey" comes from the Latin
sur
(over) and
videre
(to see), and it eventually came to mean a general or comprehensive view of anything. Studies that involve the systematic collection of data about populations are usually called surveys. This is especially true when they are concerned with large or widely dispersed groups of people. When they deal with only a fraction of a total population
—
a fraction representative of the total
—
they are called sample surveys. The term "sample survey" should ideally be used only if the part of the population studied is selected by accepted statistical methods.
Surveys can be classified broadly into two types
—
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