What are the standard errors of the estimates obtained from the SHRM LINE sample?
If the companies responding to the SHRM LINE Manufacturing Survey were a random sample from the population of all U.S. manufacturing firms, we could be 90% confident that the sample mean was within plus or minus three percentage points of the population mean. Since the sample was drawn from among U.S. manufacturing firms on the SHRM membership list, the differences between the sample mean and the mean for all U.S. manufacturers may be greater than would be expected due to sampling variation alone.