Question 1
Statistics is useful in all fields of studies including business, sports, healthcare, and criminal justice.
- Discuss how statistics is related to your field of study. Field if Study is Human Resources
- What question would you be interested in answering?
- What data would you collect and how would you collect the data to help answer this question?
- What statistics do you want to find, such as mean, median, and variance?
- What conclusions can be drawn based on the results?
Question 2
Assume that you are interested in doing a statistical survey and using confidence intervals for your conclusion. Describe a possible scenario and indicate what the population is, and what measure of the population you would try to estimate (proportion or mean) by using a sample.
- What is your estimate of the population size?
- What sample size will you use? Why?
- How will you gather information for your sample? Describe your process.
- What confidence percentage will you use? Why?
Assume that you have completed the survey and now state your results using a confidence interval statement. You can make up the numbers based on a reasonable result.
Question 3
The average body temperature for healthy adults is 98.6 °F. Is this statement true? Do all healthy people have exactly the same body temperature? A study was conducted a few years go to examine this belief.
The body temperatures of n = 130 healthy adults were measured (half male and half female). The average temperature from the sample was found to be x̄ = 98.249 with standard deviation s = 0.7332.
Do these statistics contradict the belief that the average body temperature is 98.6? If the true average temperature is indeed 98.6 °F and we obtain a sample of n = 130 healthy adults, we would not expect the sample mean to come out exactly equal to 98.6 °F. We observed x̄ = 98.249- can this deviation from 98.6 be explained by chance or is it unlikely we would observe a value this different from 98.6?
Two people debating this issue could come to different conclusions.
Using the methods introduced in this module, discuss how you would determine if the data contradicts the hypothesis that the average body temperature is 98.6°F.
