honeycfa

The sampling distribution of a statistic is:

A) always a standard normal distribution.

B) the probability distribution consisting of all possible sample statistics computed from samples of the same size drawn from the same population.

C) the same as the probability distribution of the underlying population.

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A sample statistic itself is a random variable, so it also has a probability distribution. For example, suppose we start with a sample of the prices of 200 stocks, and we calculate the sample mean of a random sample of 40 of those stocks. If we repeat this many times, we will have many different estimates of the sample mean. The distribution of these estimates of the mean is the sampling distribution of the mean. A statistic’s sampling distribution is not necessarily normal or the same as that of the population.