key words

• sample- a group of people who take part in the research
• population- a group of people who are the focus of the researcher's interest, from which a smaller sample is drawn
• target population- the group of people that the researcher draws the sample from and wants to be able to generalise the findings
• representative- the sample closely matching the target population as a whole in terms of key variables and characteristics
• generalisable- the extent to which findings and conclusions from a particular investigation can be broadly applied to the population . This is only possible if the sample of participants is representative of the target population