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

A political poll that is used to indicate the percentage of voters who will vote for a particular candidate makes use of which of the following?

What is meant by the term statistical inference?

It is possible for a nonstatistical sample to yield statistics that have values closer to the corresponding parameter than will a statistical sample.

A major fast-food chain has installed a device that measures the temperature of the hamburgers on the grill. These data are stored in a computer file. If you were to analyze these data, you would be working with ordinal level data.

A light bulb manufacturer wants to advertise the average life of its light bulbs so it tests a subset of light bulbs. This is an example of inferential statistics.

The human resources department at a major high tech company recently conducted an employee satisfaction survey of 100 of its 3,000 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 would be classified as nominal level data?

Suppose a professor collects survey data by passing out surveys in his/her classes, where the population of interest is defined as all students enrolled at that university. This is an example of nonstatistical sampling technique.

An Internet service provider wants to determine its level of customer satisfaction. The best data collection method to obtain the results most quickly is:

When the production manager selects a sample of items that have been produced on her production line and computes the proportion of those items that are defective, the proportion is referred to as a statistic.

When the California Highway Patrol states that a study of drivers on a rural highway shows that the average speed is between 62.5 mph and 64.5 mph, they are most likely basing this statement on:

When an interviewer asks a specified series of questions in the course of a personal interview, he/she is conducting an unstructured interview.

A company conducted a survey of its employees to determine their level of satisfaction with various company policies. The data collected from this survey are:

When the park ranger at Yellowstone National Park reports the average length of time that visitors spend in the park, he is using:

At the end of the school term, students are asked to rate the course and instructor by indicating on a scale of 1-5 how well they liked the course. The data generated from this question are examples of ordinal data.

In developing and conducting a survey, what is the purpose of the pre-test phase?

In a survey, what is meant by demographic questions and why might we want to include demographic questions in survey?

Explain the difference between stratified random sampling and cluster random sampling.

Cluster sampling is the same thing as stratified random sampling.

As a member of the student council at your university, you have been assigned the task of conducting a phone survey of undergraduate students to determine satisfaction with the campus food service. Explain how you would go about selecting a simple random sample.

A short survey with closed-end questions is likely to have a better response rate than a long survey with open-ended questions.