STAT 201:23

Assignment 1 on Chapter 1

The following three questions are to be answered (can be hand-written or typed up) and handed in by the end of class on Wednesday, January 13.

  1. (1.18, page 26)College Application Data. Colleges and universities are requiring an increasing amount of information about applicants before making acceptance and financial aid decisions. Classify each of the following types of data required on a college application as quantitative or qualitative.
  1. High school GPA: Quantitative
  2. Honours, awards: Qualitative
  3. Applicant’s score on SAT or ACT (score is a number): Quantitative
  4. Gender of Applicant: Qualitative
  5. Parents’ income: Quantitative
  6. Age of applicant: Quantitave
  1. (1.30, page 27) Guilt in Decision Making. The effect of guilt emotion on how a decision maker focuses on the problem was investigated in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (January 2007). A total of 171 volunteer students participated in the experiment, where each was randomly assigned to one of three emotional states (guilt, anger or neutral) through a reading/writing task. Immediately after the task, the students were presented with a decision problem (e.g. whether or not to spend money on repairing a very old car). The researchers found that a higher proportion of students in the guilty-state group chose to repair the car than those in the neutral-state and anger-state groups.
  1. Identify the population, sample, and variables measured for this study.

The population is all students or all decision makers. The sample is the 171 volunteer students. The variables are emotional state (guilt, anger or neutral) and decision (yes or no)

  1. Identify the data-collection method used.

Designed experiment because the researchers created an artificial situation and surveyed the students.

  1. What inference was made by the researcher?

That a higher proportion of students in the guilty-state group chose to repair the car than those in the neutral-state and anger-state groups.

  1. Suppose StFX wants to learn more about students who live in residence. Give an example of each of the following kinds of samples, and explain whether each is a representative sample:
  1. Stratified: Take 5 random students from every residence building. This should be fairly representative because all residences are represented, and the 5 students are random.
  2. Cluster: Take all students from Bishop’s and Lane. This is not representative because it is limited to just two buildings.
  3. Systematic: Make an alphabetical list of all students living in residence and take every 5th on the list. This is representative because it should get students from all residences, genders, and years of programs.