In statistics, what does the term 'property' indicate?

The term 'property' in statistics indicates a quality that is projected from the sample to the larger population. In statistical analyses, researchers often work with a sample – a subset of the population – to make inferences about the entire population without needing to study every individual within it.

When a property is identified in a sample, such as a mean or a standard deviation, researchers aim to generalize this information to understand how it behaves in the larger population. This is crucial for drawing valid conclusions and ensuring that the findings can be appropriately applied beyond the immediate data set. The ability to extrapolate sample properties to the population is a foundational principle in inferential statistics and underpins hypothesis testing and confidence interval construction.