\"Bad\" statistics may also result from asking questions in the wrong place or a
ID: 3024021 • Letter: #
Question
"Bad" statistics may also result from asking questions in the wrong place or at the wrong time. Explain why the following may lead to useless data. To determine the average number of pedestrians who walk through a downtown shopping mall, a researcher makes his counts during mid-December. To determine the average number of motor vehicles that use a certain highway, a researcher makes his counts every weekend for several weeks. To determine the attitudes of residents of a town toward a proposed bond issue for the construction of a high school, the researcher interviews parents as they pick up and deliver their children who attend grade school. To determine the proportion of women who would purchase a new line oi expensive, high-fashion shoes, a student employee of a research company interviews all of the women students in her statistics class. Explain why the following may lead to useless data. To determine the proportion of improperly filled cans of paint, an inspector at the filling machine examines every 10th can as it leaves the filling machine. To determine how voters in a city feel about an issue, a pollster randomly selects a page in the telephone directory and calls every telephone number -the page.Explanation / Answer
a) Since researcher makes his counts during mid-December then automatically biasness come into the data due to the weather condition and christmas. So, there is a tendency among all the people to buy winter clothes, gifts for their relatives and friends.Naturally, the shopping malls is tend to be overcrowded in this particular period of the year. So, this period of the year is not appropriate to pick the sample.
b) Here also, weekend is not the appropriate point of time to collect the data regarding the number of motor vehicles that use a certain highway. Because, in weekend normally offices, schools, colleges remain closed. So, there will be no daily commuters on the weekends. The sample would be a biased sample.
c) If the sample consists only the parents who pick up and drop their children, then the researcher is not covering the whole population and all kind or people stay there. So, that is a complete bias.
d) If the women students of statistics class are only interviewed by the student employee, then it would be a very bad sample for this purpose. Because, mostly students do not have that amount of money to purchase a new line of expensive, high-fashion shoes. Plus there can be some students in her class,may not be that rich to afford that luxuriousness. So, the sample would be very much biased.
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