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

A consumer products company wants to interview customers regarding a new product. If it wishes to adhere to a predetermined pattern of questions in the interview, which of the following would likely be used?

A common underpinning of all statistical sampling techniques is the concept of random selection.

Which of the following data collection methods is most likely to generate the largest nonresponse?

Some of the most common methods of collecting data include experiments, telephone surveys, mail questionnaires, direct observations, and personal interviews.

Data collected on marital status (married, divorced, single, other) would be an ordinal level variable.

Data collected on the Internet can generally be considered accurate since the data must go through a screening process before they can be placed on the Internet.

If a state agency wishes to conduct on-site surveys of small businesses throughout the state, cluster sampling could potentially be used to reduce the geographical area over which the surveys would need to be conducted.

The First National Bank mailed out a survey to all 3,456 savings account customers. A total of 568 surveys were returned. Values computed from the returned surveys would constitute parameters since all 568 customers were surveyed.

Statistics are measures computed from the entire population of data.

A cell phone service provider has 14,000 customers. Recently, the sales department selected a random sample of 400 customer accounts and recorded the number of minutes of long distance time used during the previous billing period. The company analyst used Excel to sort these values in order from high to low. She then assigned the highest value a rank of 1, the next highest value a rank of 2, and so forth. These ranks would be considered to be ordinal data.

When the marketing manager for a large company surveys a portion of the total customers of his company, he is using a sample from the population.

Close-end questions provide the greatest opportunity to obtain ideas and thoughts on the part of those surveyed but the resulting data are more difficult to analyze.

One of the advantages of data check sheets is that as the data are being recorded, they are also being displayed in a useful format.

Recently, a bank manager pulled a sample of customer accounts and recorded data for two variables, checking account balance and total number of transactions during the previous 30 days. The data collected would be considered time-series data.

Companies frequently use charts and graphs in their regular communications with stockholders and investors; this shows the use of descriptive statistics.

If you have an ordinal variable, it is possible to precisely measure the magnitude of the difference between the possible values of the variable.

General Electric Corporation tracks employee turnover annually. It currently has a data set that contains turnover for the past 20 years. What type of data does it have?

The high temperature is recorded each day for a period of 1 year. This is an example of:

When a small sample is used, a stratified random sample is more likely to provide the desired information than a simple random sample.

Open the data file provided with the text called AirlinePassengers. Indicate the level of data measurement for each variable in the data set.