Exam 4: Data Collection and Sampling

The Admissions Officer from a large university mailed a survey to 600 students selected at random. The sample was designed to include 150 students randomly selected from each of the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior classes on campus. What sampling method was used?

Excluding some members of the target population results in ____________________ bias.

Smoking and Heart Attacks: A medical researcher is interested in investigating the relationship between smoking and heart attacks -How can you show that smoking causes heart attacks without being able to do a designed experiment?

Which of the following data collection methods is not observational?

A simple random sample is chosen in such a fashion that every possible subset of the same size has an equal chance of being selected.

Is it possible for a sample to yield better results than a census, from a practical standpoint? Explain.

To reduce sampling error, minimize the chance for bias to occur during sampling.

A target population and a sampled population mean the same thing.

Nonresponse error occurs when responses are not obtained from some members of the sample.

When every possible sample with the same number of observations is equally likely to be chosen, the result is called a:

____________________ error results from the failure to collect data from all subjects in the sample.

A nonsampling error can be caused by the wording of a question.

The manager of the customer service division of a major consumer electronics company is interested in determining whether the customers who have purchased a videocassette recorder over the past 12 months are satisfied with their products. If there are 4 different brands of videocassette recorders made by the company, the best sampling strategy would be to use a:

The Chairman of a College of Business with five departments wants to estimate the average number of student-hours lost per month due to illness of their professors. Describe a sampling plan that will help the Dean compare the average student-loss hours for the five departments.

The larger the sample size is, the more accurate we can expect our sample estimates to be.

A self-selected sample is one in which the individuals choose themselves to be in the sample.

Sampling error refers to the difference between the sample and the population that exists only because of the observations that happened to be selected for the sample by chance.

Smoking and Heart Attacks: A medical researcher is interested in investigating the relationship between smoking and heart attacks -What type of studies are plausible in this particular scenario, observational studies or experiments?

Which of the following must be avoided in designing a survey?

Experimental data tend to be more reliable, or "stronger," than survey data.