In an ideal world, the researcher would begin the study with a clear idea of what the population of interest is since the process of designing a study and testing hypotheses about the data that it pro...In an ideal world, the researcher would begin the study with a clear idea of what the population of interest is since the process of designing a study and testing hypotheses about the data that it produces does depend on the population about which you want to make statements. Irrespective of how I define the population, the critical point is that the sample is a subset of the population, and our goal is to use our knowledge of the sample to draw inferences about the properties of the population.