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

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 considered to be qualitative data?

Descriptive statistical tools include graphs,charts,and numerical measures.

In an unstructured interview the questions are scripted.

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

A value computed from a population is called:

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.

A manufacturing manager has developed a table that shows the average production volume each day for the past three weeks.The average production level is an example of a numerical measure.

Some stores and restaurants have "tell us what you think" cards available for customers.Assuming that angry customers are more likely to take the time to fill these out,this is an example of:

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.

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

When a company scans the bar codes on its products in an effort to count the number of products that remain in inventory,the company is collecting data through experimentation.

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

Recently,a major tire manufacturer stated in its advertising that its tires with a new tire tread design will last more than 50,000 miles on average.A consumer agency collected a subset of these tires and tested them in very controlled conditions.Based on this test,the agency concluded that the manufacturer was justified in making this claim.The process described is an example of:

A food warehouse manager plans to conduct a check on damaged packages.The warehouse covers a large area and products are spread out over the entire building.Assuming that no products are more likely to have damaged packages than any other,what statistical sampling method would be used to reduce the time and effort required to do the study?

Is there ever a reason why we might prefer to work with a sample rather than with an entire population? Discuss.

The human resources department at a major high tech company plans to conduct an employee satisfaction study by sampling 100 employees from the 3,000 total employees.They plan to use systematic random sampling since the employee file is in alphabetic order.The first employee selected in the study should be:

Data collected using open-end questions is generally easier to analyze than data collected from closed-end questions.

The Dalton Company has recently made a decision to build a new plant in Denver.In making this decision it used data supplied by the U.S.Census Bureau.For the Dalton Company,these data are examples of:

Experimental design is a plan for performing an experiment where the effects of one or more factors on the variable of interest are measured.

When an administrator at a local hospital prepares a series of charts and graphs pertaining to the patients that have stayed at the hospital during the past month,she is using which general category of statistical analysis?