A statistical consultant was retained by a linen supplier to analyze a survey of

Question

A statistical consultant was retained by a linen supplier to analyze a survey of hospital purchasing managers. After looking at the data, she realized that the survey had missed several key geographic areas and included some that were outside the target region. Some survey questions were ambiguous. Some respondents failed to answer all the questions or gave silly replies (one managers said he worked 40 hours a day). Of 1,000 surveys mailed, only 80 were returned. Given this information, answer the following questions:

What alternatives are available to the researcher?

Might an imperfect analysis be better than none?

If you were the consultant, how might you respond to the supplier?

Explanation / Answer

Here by looking at the explanation it clearly tells that this is a convinience sampling method.The survey had missed several key geographic areas , included some that were outside the target region,survey questions were ambiguous.Hence the best alternative for the researcher is to redo the survey.

I would prefer not to do the analysis rather than doing a wrong analysis.Because the main key aspects of the survey like geographic boundaries,good valid questions lack here.So even if we do the analysis the result which we might get is wrong, hence our interpretation might go wrong.Which is not at all useful.Hence I would prefer not to do any analysis to this data.

If I were the consultant I would ask the suplier to redo the survey.The above explanation clearly says that the survey is not planned and the questions are not validated from a statistician.So i would ask the supplier to validate the questionnaire and also the set accurate geographical boundaries.Also intead of a convinience smpling he can choose some probability sampling like random sampling or systematic sampling.Also i would calculate the proper sample size including the attrition rate in it.Then even if many people will not respond we can get accurate result.

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