target population

• general rules about behaviour in every one needs to be established so that we can create psychological theories
• to do this we need to study small groups of participants known as a sample
• a sample is drawn from a larger group called a 'target population' which is the group that researchers are interested in studying
• aim- to generalise the results from the sample drawn to the target population
• if our sample is representative we can then generalise our results to the whole population