Question

At UF, there are always a few days between the end of classes and the beginning of final exams. These days are meant as a study period, but some students would prefer to take the exams as soon as possible, to have a longer vacation - in fact, some students even leave Gainesville during those days as a mini-vacation. To see if the student body supports abolishing "dead week", the Student Government decides to conduct a survey. They conduct a phone survey (with local numbers selected at random from the student directory) calling people during "dead week". Will this sample be representative of all UF students?

Answer 1

Answer:

This sample is not representative of all UF students, since those who are not local are not considered.

Step-by-step explanation:

This is a common statistics practice, when we want to study something from a population, we find a sample of this population.

However, the sample has to be representative

For example:

I want to estimate the proportion of New York state residents who are Buffalo Bills fans. So i ask, lets say, 1000 randomly selected Buffalo residents wheter they are Buffalo Bills fans, and expand this to the entire population of New York State residents. This is not representative of all New York State residents, just Buffalo residents.

In this problem, we have that:

They conduct a phone survey (with local numbers selected at random from the student directory) calling people during "dead week". Will this sample be representative of all UF students?

They only call those students with local numbers.

However, in an university, it is expected that there will be a good percentage of non local students.

So this sample is not representative of all UF students, since those who are not local are not considered.