Instructions
All writing assignments will be graded on quality of writing as well as content. All papers should be written for an audience of competent people who have not had a statistics class (think of a newspaper article or summary report to be read by your supervisor). All papers should be easy to read, i.e. paragraph form, typed (word processed) in a standard 12-point font with reasonable margins and double spaced. Use full sentences, proper grammar and spelling, and make sure that your paper is coherent and accurate. Please refer to the grading rubric for specific expectations.
Writing Assignment 4 Topic
Find a newspaper, newsmagazine article, or an online written report from a television news outlet reporting a confidence interval estimate or margin of error for a population mean or population proportion. Please be sure the confidence interval or margin of error is for population mean or population proportion and NOT some other parameter, such as a risk, relative risk, count, etc. Any source from the web should be from a reputable and well-known newspaper, news magazine, or news media organization—and not a wiki or blog.
You may, instead, use an article in a peer-reviewed academic journal reporting an interval estimate or margin of error for a population mean or population proportion, which has relevance to your chosen field of study. However, if you use this option, you must also include a paragraph in the comments section of your submission explaining why the topic of the article is relevant to your future work. Again, please be sure the confidence interval or margin of error is for population mean or population proportion and NOT some other parameter, such as a risk, relative risk, count, etc.
Attach or link the article. The paper should address the following questions with respect to the article and the reported interval estimate and should be about 1–2 pages in length:
- What is the population the article is making an inference about?
- What is the parameter of interest?
- How would you interpret the confidence INTERVAL in this situation?
- What confidence level is associated with the given interval? Is it reasonable?
- How would you describe a confidence LEVEL in this situation to someone who has no statistical knowledge?
- Is the reported interval relatively narrow or relatively wide compared to the spread of the variable in the context?
- How was the sample collected? Does this allow us to infer things about the population? If the article does not state how it was collected, how SHOULD it have been collected?
