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Chapter 1: Q7. (page 49)
Explain how population and variables differ?
The main difference between population and variables is that variables explain the attribute of any population.
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Stock prices. As part of an economics class project, students were asked to randomly select 500 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) stocks from the Wall Street Journal. They were then asked to summarize the current prices (also referred to as the closing price of the stock for a particular trading date) of the collected stocks using graphical and numerical techniques.
a. Identify the population of interest for this study.
b. Is the variable being collected quantitative or qualitative?
c. Identify the data collection method used in this study.
d. Identify the sample of interest for this study.
e. Identify the experimental unit and variable of interest for this study.
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.
a. Identify the population, sample, and variables measured for this study.
b. Identify the data-collection method used.
c. What inference was made by the researcher?
d. In later chapters you will learn that the reliability of an inference is related to the size of the sample used. In addition to sample size, what factors might affect the reliability of the inference drawn in this study?
The economic return to earning an MBA. What are the economic rewards (e.g., higher salary) to obtaining an MBA degree? This was the question of interest in an article published in the International Economic Review (August 2008). The researchers made inferences based on wage data collected for a sample of 3,244 individuals who sat for the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT). (The GMAT exam is required for entrance into most MBA programs.) The following sampling scheme was employed. All those who took the GMAT exam in any of four selected time periods were mailed a questionnaire. Those who responded to the questionnaire were then sent three follow-up surveys (one survey every 3 months). The final sample of 3,244 represents only those individuals who responded to all four surveys. (For example, about 5,600 took the GMAT in one time period; of these, only about 800 responded to all four surveys.)
A. For this study, describe the population of interest.
b. What method was used to collect the sample data?
c. Do you think the final sample is representative of the population? Why or why not? Comment on potential biases in the sample.
What is a representative sample? What is its value?
List and define the four elements of a descriptive statistics problem.
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