I don’t even know if the question is well written but this is my doubt: sometimes (in the area of medicine in my case) you can read numbers like “between 30 and 80 percent of the patients have a relapse”.
Isn’t a percentage an average per se?
If I do an experiment with 100 people, shouldn’t I have an exact percentage of people who react in certain way? How can’t I know if they are 30 or 80?
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The gap between percentages is simply the range of values between two percentages. In the case of your example, if a report says that between 30 and 80 percent of patients have a relapse, it means that the actual percentage falls somewhere within that range.
In medical studies, researchers often don’t have data on every single person in a population, so they collect data from a sample of people instead. This sample may not perfectly represent the entire population, and so the percentages calculated from the sample may vary slightly from the true percentages for the whole population.
Additionally, the percentage of people experiencing a certain outcome can be affected by various factors such as age, gender, genetics, lifestyle habits, and medical history, among others. Therefore, the percentage of people who experience a particular outcome can vary from person to person.
The range of percentages provided in reports reflects the uncertainty that comes with estimating percentages from a sample. A larger sample size typically leads to a smaller range and a more accurate estimate of the true percentage in the population
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