Abstract of the Thesis

Professor Mark Handcock, Chair The pursuit of accurate methods for generalizing attributes of a population from a sampled subset is a problem predating the discipline of statistics. Rather than attempting to characterize a population and so assume that the population perfectly represents its own generative process, a superpopulation approach considers the observed population as a sigma algebra of all possible data generated by a process and is focused upon estimating the parameters of the process rather than producing summary statistics. This study briefly surveys the essentials of survey sampling and evaluates a new superpopulation-based approach put forth by Chaudhuri, Handcock and Rendal