A college department wants to learn about the jobs that its alumni are working in. An online survey is set up on the department website which invites alumni to complete and includes demographic questions and questions about their job (current and history). Give a problem that can arise with this survey.
Q. 2Explain what is wrong with the following statement: When a survey is mailed out to 500 people and only 150 respond, this results in a bias called response bias..
Q. 3A questionnaire on a table at a shopping mall was completed by 100 shoppers. The results were used to claim that the average amount of money spent by Americans increased from the previous year. Explain why this claim is questionable.
Q. 4A student survey to find out whether more classes should be offered in the evening was mailed to all enrolled students at a university. Explain what a potential difficulty with this method is.
Q. 5A professor wanted to find out whether students enrolled in her statistics class would like her to increase her office hours. She plans to take a random sample of 20 students among those coming to class on the next lecture day. Explain what the difficulty with her method is.
Q. 6A short questionnaire is to be given to a sample of people. The questionnaire involves the topic of abortion. The woman who will hand out the questionnaire is a big pro-life supporter and on the day of the survey shows up with pamphlets and picket-signs expressing her opinion. What type of bias may this cause?
a. Selection bias
b. Response bias
c. Non-response bias
d. Volunteer bias
Q. 7A librarian wants to gather data on the number of times books of fiction are checked out during the year. The library has 2000 books of fiction, of which 500 are murder mysteries, 400 are science fiction, and the rest are other. She decides to sample 120 books. Suppose the librarian takes the next 120 fiction books that are turned in and calculates the average number of times these books were checked out in the last year. What sampling technique was used?
a. Self-selected sample
b. Volunteer sample
c. Convenience sample
d. Random sample
Q. 8For the Literary Digest poll of 1936 the magazine sent out questionnaires to 10 million people, of whom 2.3 million answered the questionnaire. What was the main problem with this poll?
a. Wrong sampling frame
b. Volunteer response
c. Response bias
d. Selection bias
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