Statistics

Margin of error

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Intermediate3 min read
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What does it mean?

The margin of error is half the width of an interval at a stated confidence level. It depends on sample size, variability and sampling design.

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An everyday example

Assuming simple random sampling from a large population, n=400 and p=0.50 give an approximate 95% margin of error of ±4.9 percentage points.

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Increasing the number of participants eliminates all research errors.

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Sources and further reading

Explore the foundations and methodological details in these resources. Examples on this page were created for illustration.