Q1) The data to be assessed was collected just prior to the 2008 United States presidential election. The New York Times/CBS sought after collecting data, which would be representative of the United States of America as a whole. In doing so, it would give a reasonably accurate prediction of how the nation would vote in the upcoming election. A stratified random sample was taken (the country was split up into regions and each region had a random sample taken in proportion to its population size) by means of telephone survey. The manner in which the data was collected had both good and bad aspects and upon considering both we will be able to come to the conclusion on whether the data will be representative of the purpose it is intended for.
To begin with we are told that the sample was made up of 1152, however only 1046 of these were registered to vote. The population of this survey would have been people who were registered to vote, as ultimately it was only these people who could decide the election. This meant the 106 people not registered should have been excluded from the survey results. Furthermore a sample of 1152 people I feel is too small a sample to be representative of the U.S as a whole. 1152 people …show more content…
In this case, people who were cold called and asked a series of questions regarding their vote in the upcoming election would more than likely be skeptical about giving such information out over telephone. Many people regard their vote as their own private business and would not share this, in particular with a member of the media who would use that data to publish results to the general public. Moreover, a long string of questions such as this survey may lead to the participants becoming bored and giving false information in order to finish the survey and getting off the