The Use of Samples and Doing Generalization in Research

If in the past, every time you bought a certain brand of soft drink, you liked it, you would probably infer that every time you buy that brand in the future, you will also like it, right? It's common to look to past personal experience to make predictions about future events and circumstances in the world. People often make assumptions, or generalizations, based on inference. These are logical conclusions that derive from premises that are already known or assumed to be true.
Imagine your dog and your neighbor's dog both like peanut butter. Based on this knowledge, you might infer that all dogs like peanut butter. However, this kind of generalization is not sufficient to provide trustworthiness in an argument. There are requirements for good arguments that use generalizations. One such strategy uses simple enumeration. If you observe that a sample of a group's members share a certain characteristic, you might infer that all of the members share the same characteristic. This strategy is only legitimate for use in an argument, however, when you have a sample that is representative of a much larger group. In other words, the sample group must be large enough to stand in for the larger group. Additionally, participants must be randomly selected. This means that there is no special selection of the group members. Every person in the larger target population should have an equal chance of being chosen as part of the smaller sample group.
Step 1 Address the importance of group samples.
-How can we make an inference about a target group based on a sample?
-Why is it necessary that the sample size is large enough, and that the sample is random?
-Discuss inductive probability. What does it mean and what role does it play in generalization?
Step 2 Address the following questions in your posts:
-Can you think of an example of a case in which generalization is done correctly? Discuss the evidence that supports the conclusion.
-Can you think of an example of a case in which generalization is done incorrectly? Explain.