1. Which type of research design is appropriate for the following example?
A company wants to discover if changing from mail advertisements to TV advertising will increase sales at its furniture stores.
2. Which type of research design is appropriate for the following example?
The regional director wants to know which banking services are being offered by competitors in the region.
3. Which type of research design is appropriate for the following example?
The manager wants to know what the reasons are that customers buy from his shoe store.
4. Which type of research design is appropriate for the following example?
A consultant wants to know what the average level of patient satisfaction is for hospitals in a city.
5. Which type of research design is appropriate for the following example?
A car dealer wants to know if having one of their representatives call recent new car purchasers would increase the level of satisfaction customers feel with their purchase. Select the best answer and enter it in the blank.
What color is the sky?
A) brown
B) pink
C) blue
D) green
6. Which of the following is the most important consideration in avoiding bias in surveying?
A) Taking care to choose individuals who you feel are representative of the population in terms of as many characteristics as you can list
B) Picking a sampling method in which every possible combination of people has the same chance of being selected
C) Making sure that every individual in the population of interest is invited to respond
D) Sending out a large enough number of surveys so that even if the response rate turns out to be low, you will have sufficient numbers of responses to do statistical analysis
E) Taking care that the words used are not so neutral that they will be boring to potential respondents
7. You have been asked to do a survey of classmates in your high school and you need to draw a simple random sample. You plan to draw a sample of 60 students.
Which of the following procedures will give you a simple random sample?
A) You assume that students have been randomly placed in classes, so you choose three classes by random selection and place all of those students in your sample.
B) You have a list with the names of all the students on it. You choose one out of the first 10 names at random. Then you choose every nth student name on the list until you have 60 students for your sample.
C) Choose the first 60 students that pass through the front door at the beginning of school in the morning.
D) Put the name of each classmate in school on a piece of paper and place the pieces of paper in a cardboard box. Next randomly select 60 pieces of paper from the box.
E) You randomly choose 10 students from each of the six advanced physics classes.
8. In one research study, half of a class was told to watch 1 hour of television each day. The other half of the class was instructed to watch 5 hours of television each day.
Afterwards, the average grades for each half of a class were compared with each other. In a second research study, all the students of a class gave their responses to a set of questions that asked about their television viewing habits and also about their grades in the class.
Which of the following statements is true?
A) The first research study was an observational study, while the second was a controlled experiment.
B) The first research study was an experiment without a control group, while the second study was an observational study.
C) Both research studies were controlled experiments.
D) Both research studies were observational studies.
E) Each research study was part controlled experiment and part observational study.
9. A consultant planning a survey of elementary school principals in a particular state has lists of the elementary school principals employed in each of the 95 school districts. The procedure will be to obtain a random sample of elementary school principals from each of the districts rather than grouping all the lists together and obtaining a sample from the entire group.
Which of the following statements is true?
A) This is a simple random sample achieved in an easier and less expensive manner than procedures involving sampling from the whole population of principals.
B) This is a cluster sample in which the entire population was divided into heterogeneous groups called clusters.
C) This is an example of systematic sampling, which can achieve a reasonable sample as long as the original order of the list is not related to the variables under consideration.
D) This is an example of proportional sampling based on the actual sizes of the school districts in the total population.
E) This is a stratified sample, which may yield comparative information that a simple random sample couldn't give.
10. A consultant conducts a study to find out if spending more hours studying leads to better point scoring by players on basketball teams. The consultant surveys 70 players, and notes that the 35 basketball players who claim to study the most hours per day have a higher scoring average than the 35 players who study less. Because of the study results, the coach starts requiring the players to spend more time studying.
Which of the following statements is true?
A) While this study may have its faults, it still does prove causation.
B) While this is a controlled experiment, the conclusion of the coach is not justified.
C) There might potentially be a confounding variable responsible for the apparent relationship.
D) To get the athletes to study more, it might be more meaningful to have them put in more practice time on the court to increase their
point averages, since higher point averages seem to be associated with more study time.
E) No proper conclusion is possible without somehow introducing blinding (blind, or double-blind).