Barry Beach was convicted of murder in 1983 and sentenced to life in prison with

Question

Barry Beach was convicted of murder in 1983 and sentenced to life in prison without parole. In 2015, Governor Bullock commuted Beach's sentence after years of controversy surrounding Beach's confession, trial and subsequent conviction. A news program in Bozeman wanted to find out more about how people in Montana feel about Beach's release. The local program invited viewers to go their website and indicate their opinions. At the end of the show, 72% of people who voted in the poll indicated they agreed with Bullock's decision.

What is the population of interest?

1-All Montana residents

2-Viewers of this TV show

3-Residents of Bozeman, MT

4-Residents of Poplar, MT

Identify the variable measured.

What is the appropriate plot to use to display this variable?

True or False: It is valid to conclude that 72% of Montanans agree with Bullock's decision to commute Beach's sentence.

Is 0.72 a statistic or a parameter? Why?

What type of sampling method did the news program use?

Say the news program, unhappy with their original sampling method, decided to get a list of all their viewers and randomly call 50 people from the list. The list of program viewers would be called the ______.

1-Parameter

2-Sampling frame

3-Sample

4-Population

Explanation / Answer

Carefully read the statement - 'A news program in Bozeman wanted to find out more about how people in Montana feel about Beach's release.'

It clearly suggests that the population of interest here is 'All Montana Residents'.

So, option 1 is correct.

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The variable measured is the opinion of people on Bullock's decision, whether they agreed to it or not.

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A percentage frequency distribution or a pie chart would be best way to represent this variable as we have two categoies and we are talking in terms of percentage.

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False

Because this is just a sample of people who have voted on the news website. There might be many people who didn't even vote on the website with their opinion. So, we can't surely say from a group of people that It is valid to conclude that 72% of Montanans agree with Bullock's decision to commute Beach's sentence. We would need many more such samples and many more such sample proportions to come to any conclusion.

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0.72 is a statistic which is sample proportion. The parameter is a value obtained from the population. As explained earlier, this data is only from a group of people, so its not the population proportion and hence not a parameter.

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This was a random sampling method as no strata or grouping was involved. All the voters randomly voted on the internet website.

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This would be a sampling frame because we are treating the program viewers as our population and then drawing sample from it of size 50.

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