What is the difference standard error of mean and sampling error?

Answer 1

The standard error of the mean and sampling error are two similar but still very different things.

In order to find some statistical information about a group that is extremely large, you are often only able to look into a small group called a sample. In order to gain some insight into the reliability of your sample, you have to look at its standard deviation. Standard deviation in general tells you spread out or variable your data is. If you have a low standard deviation, that means your data is very close together with little variability. The standard deviation of the mean is calculated by dividing the standard deviation of the sample by the square root of the number of things in the sample. What this essentially tells you is how certain are that your sample accurately describes the entire group. A low standard error of the mean implies a very high accuracy.

While the standard error of the mean just gives a sense for how far you are away from a true value, the sampling error gives you the exact value of the error by subtracting the value calculated for the sample from the value for the entire group. However, since it is often hard to find a value for an entire large group, this exact calculation is often impossible, while the standard error of the mean can always be found.