French term for resources (not people) in a sample

Question

I am looking for a or the French term for the individual resource or item in a statistical sample that does not consist of people. The term should be generic enough to cover, for example, sampled web pages from a website, screens from a web app, screens from a desktop applications and similar things that may be evaluated for their usability or accessibility. ("Accessibility" here refers to "accessibility for people with disabilities".)

When reading articles about statistical samples, e.g. Échantillonnage (statistiques), Qu'est-ce que l'échantillonnage statistique ? or Echantillonnage et précision statistique – Comment optimiser vos échantillons, these seem to focus exclusively on samples from human populations, so they are of no help.

I have considered phrases such as "unité observée dans l'échantillon" (suggested by IATE as a translation of "sample item"), "unité d'échantillonnage" (from TechDico), "ressource échantillonnée" and "unité échantillonnée", but the first one is unwieldy and I don't know if the other ones really fit the type of items in my samples. One of the reasons why I'm uncertain what to choose is that the phrase should also fit into larger phrases such as a French translation of "illustration of sample item [item title/name]".

Or should I simply use "échantillon" in the sense of "specimen" instead of "subset"?

Answer 1

If one wants to stick to purely statistical parlance, then it is perfectly acceptable to refer to single element of a sample as un individu, even if it is of inanimate nature. Another possibility is unité statistique (see here and here.)

However, it is necessary to keep in mind that sample / échantillon has ambiguous meaning both in English and French:

• From statistical viewpoint it is a collection of items/individuals sampled from a population
• In specific fields (like physics, biology, medicine, etc.) it often means a single item / device that is an object of study: rock sample, urine sample, etc. If analyzed statistically, many such samples form what a statistician would call a sample from population.

As a more specific example, I could attest the use in computational biology, where the data taken from a single person are referred to as échantillon, and statistical analysis is performed on an ensemble/collection des échantillons (see also statistical ensemble.)

Thus, referring to a single item as échantillon and the collection as ensemble des échantillons is understandable in most fields - perhaps better than the proper statistical use of terms.

Update
Wikipedia article on Unité statistique says:

Les unités statistiques sont les éléments des populations, dans le langage des statisticiens. On parle aussi plus communément d'individus (les premières statistiques étant des études démographiques).
Selon le cas, l'unité statistique peut être un individu, un ménage, une entreprise, un établissement, une commune, un département, une région ou encore un pays.

Another place to look is the definition by Insee, which is the authority in France when it comes to collecting and analyzing statistical data (Insee = Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques.)