BASIC CONCEPTS IN STATISTICS

Identify each as a variable or a constant:

2.1.      The number of months in a
year.

2.2       The gender of female
business students in a study designed to investigate their career
aspirations.

2.3.      The age when people choose to
retire.

2.4.      The GMAT scores of the senior
business class students.

Identify each variable as continuous or
discrete:

2.5.      Grade level

2.6.      Age

2.7.      Height

2.8.      Number of children in a family

Identify each as nominal,
ordinal, interval, or
ratio:

2.9.      The TV channel watched the
most on Thursday night in four cities.

2.10.    The percentage
of respondents watching each TV program at 8:00pm on Thursday.

2.11.    Ranking of the 5 most important problems
in the U.S.A. today.

2.12.    List of GMAT scores for the business
schools in the county.

2.13.    Classification of students by the state
where they were born.

2.14.    The number of residents in six different
states.

2.15.    Class rank.

Classify each as descriptive or inferential
statistics:

2.16     The mean
quality scores of all the plants owned by a company.

2.17.    The results of
the TV ratings as obtained by A.C. Nielsen for 3000 households with
the people-meter (the “black box”).

2.18     The
number of employees signing up for a new health insurance plan.

2.19     The blood
pressure of a group of volunteers given a new experimental drug to
lower blood pressure.

Fill in the
blanks:

2.20     The most
important characteristic of a good sample is that it is _________
of the population.

2.21.    A study where
numerical information about the total population is gathered by
including all members of the population is called a __________.

2.22.    The sample’s
statistics are used to estimate the population’s _________.

2.23.    When every
20th person is chosen from a group of 1000 people, we obtain a
__________ sample.

2.24.    A hypothesis
that predicts that there is a difference or relationship
between variables or groups is called the __directional________
hypothesis, and is represented by the symbol H_A or
H₁.

2.25.    When means
from two groups are compared, the null hypothesis states that the
difference between the means is _________.

2.26.    In order to
decide whether the null hypothesis should be rejected or retained,
the sample statistic obtained as a result of the
statistical calculations is compared to the appropriate __________,
found usually in a table in an appendix in statistics books.

2.27.    In many
statistical tests, degrees of freedom (df) are calculated
by subtracting 1 from _______.

Circle the correct answer:

A biased sample contains a random/systematic
error.

A random sample is always/may not always be
representative of the population from which it was selected.

2.30.    To analyze
data measured on a nominal scale, researchers should use
parametric/nonparametric statistics.

2.31.    The
information gained about the sample is used to generalize to the
population and to estimate its values in
descriptive/inferential statistics.

2.32 Inferential statistics may/may not include
descriptive statistics, such as the mean.