1.2 Data, Sampling, and Variation in Data and Sampling
The following activities and questions relate to material covered in Chapter 1.2 Data, Sampling, and Variation in Data and Sampling in Introductory Business Statistics (OpenStax).
Questions
Name the sampling method used in each of the following situations:
- At the Beaver Creek Public Library, a librarian wants to determine what proportion of the library users are children. The librarian has a tally sheet on which she marks whether books are checked out by an adult or a child. She records this data for every fourth patron who checks out books.
- A Yukon University instructor wants to know if her students are doing the required take-home exercises, so she randomly selects rows 1 and 3 in the (virtual) classroom and calls on all students in those rows to present the solutions to the take-home exercises to the rest of the class.
- An Air North employee is at the airport handing out questionnaires to travelers asking them to evaluate their experience with the Yukon airline company. They do not want to disturb anyone looking like they are in a rush, so focus on asking travelers who are calmly sitting at their gates or look to not be too busy.
- The regional manager of Petro-Canada wants information about the ages of the customers who buy gas from them. Over the next two weeks, at each station location all over the Yukon, 50 randomly selected customers are given questionnaires to fill out asking for information about their age.
- Yukon Health & Social Services wants to know what people’s reactions to the Covid-19 vaccination roll-out information package are. The day after the schedule was released, the department team surveys 1,200 randomly selected Yukoners.
Solutions
- Systematic sampling
- Cluster sampling
- Convenience sampling
- Stratified sampling
- Simple Random sampling