Exam 1: The Where, Why, and How of Data Collection

Descriptive statistics allow a decision maker to reach a conclusion about a population based on a subset from the population.

When a survey uses the responses strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, strongly agree, this is an example of:

A sales manager has five salespeople. The following are the number of units sold by the five salespeople during the past week: {5, 13, 6, 2, 4}. Based on the data, the mean number of units sold was 6 units.

When customers return a product to a store and the store asks the customer to indicate the reason that the merchandise was returned, the resulting data are quantitative since multiple people will be providing the data.

In order to determine a parameter (such as a mean) of a population you would need to conduct a:

The difference between interval data and ratio data is that interval data has a natural zero.

One of the reasons that managers prefer statistical sampling to nonstatistical sampling is that statistical sampling is generally easier to perform and less expensive.

A census is an enumeration of the entire sample of items selected from the population of interest.

A variable that has all the properties of an interval variable, but also has a true zero, is a ratio level variable.

An accountant has recently prepared a report for a client that contains a variety of graphs and charts. In doing so, she has used descriptive statistical methods.

When people fail to respond to a survey, the data collection process may suffer from nonresponse bias.

The editor of a local newspaper is interested in determining the percentage of subscribers who read the paper's editorials. The statistical technique that he would use is called estimation.

The Cranston Company recently met with a group of its customers to ask questions about the service and products provided by the company. The data collected in this process would be an example of data collected through direct observation.

For which data collection method is it most important to have a polished-looking survey form?

An experiment is a process that generates data as its outcome.

A survey conducted by a local real estate agency asked respondents to indicate whether they preferred natural gas, electric, or oil furnaces for heating their home. The data collected for this variable would be of ordinal level.

The human resources department at a major high tech company recently conducted an employee satisfaction survey of 100 of its 3000 employees. Data were collected on such variables as age, gender, marital status, current salary, level of overall satisfaction on a scale from 1 to 5, number of years with the company, and job title. Which of the variables listed are considered to be ratio level data?

When students are asked to list their age and the percentage of their college expenses that they pay for themselves, the type of data being collected is quantitative.

A professor hands out survey forms during her classes, where the population is all students attending the college. This is an example of:

When stratified random sampling is employed, the population is divided into homogeneous subgroups called strata.