Stratified sampling

Okay kiddo, have you ever had a big bag of candy and wanted to make sure you tasted every flavor? That's kind of like what stratified sampling is all about.

Let's say you have a bag of 100 candies and there are 5 different flavors - chocolate, gummy, sour, fruit, and mint. But you're not sure how many of each flavor are in the bag.

Instead of just grabbing candies randomly and hoping you get a good mix, you can use stratified sampling. This means you divide the candies into groups based on their flavors, or "strata."

So you might put all the chocolate candies in one group, all the gummy candies in another group, and so on until you have 5 groups.

Then, you can randomly pick a certain number of candies from each group. Maybe you decide to pick 10 candies from each group, so you end up with a sample of 50 candies total.

That way, you know you'll have a good mix of all the different flavors in your sample. This can be really helpful if you're trying to study something specific about the candies, like which flavor is the most popular.

Does that make sense, kiddo? Stratified sampling is like organizing your candies into groups and then picking a few from each group so you can get a good mix.