CASE STUDY: JMP008

Siblings

by Dr. DeWayne Derryberry, Idaho State University, Department of Mathematics

Key Concepts: Histograms, normal quantile plots, log transformations, confidence intervals, inverse transformation

Dr. DeWayne Derryberry

Idaho State University

Objective

Use data from a survey of students to perform exploratory data analysis and to evaluate the performance of different approaches to a statistical analysis.

Background

The following data are a mixture of surveys from a small liberal arts school on the West Coast. Each semester students in introductory statistics courses complete a survey. One of the questions is the number of siblings in their immediate family. The results of the survey are similar each semester, but results have been combined in a haphazard manner so that there is no chance any particular class can be identified.

The Task

Estimate the average number of siblings for the general population.