Chapter 1 Defining and Collecting Data
1. Social media provides an enormous amount of data about the activities and habits of people using
social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The belief is that mining that data provides a treasure trove
for those who seek to quantify and predict future human behavior. A marketer is planning a survey of
Internet users in the United States to determine social media usage. The objective of the survey is to gain
insight on these three items: key social media platforms used, frequency of social media usage, and
demographics of key social media platform users.
a. For each of the three items listed, indicate whether the variables are categorical or numerical. If
a variable is numerical is it discrete or continuous?
b. Develop three categorical questions for the survey.
c. Develop three numerical questions for the survey.
2. The registrar of a university with a population of N=4,000 full time students are asked by the president
to conduct a survey to measure satisfaction with the quality of life on campus. The register intends to take
a probability sample of n=200 students and project the results from the sample to the entire population of
full-time students.
a. If the frame available from the registrar’s files is an alphabetical listing of the names of all
N=4,000 registered full-time students, what type of sample could you take?
b. How would you select a simple random sample? Please list the indexes of the first 3 students in
your sample.
c. How would you select a systematic sample in? Please list the indexes of the first 3 students in
your sample.
d. If the frame available from the registrar’s files is a list of the names of all N=4,000 registered
full-time students complied from eight separate alphabetical lists, based on the gender and
class designation breakdowns, what type of sample should you take and how would you do?
e. Suppose that all the students lived in one of the 10 campus dormitories. Each dormitory
accommodates 400 students. It is college policy to fully integrate students by gender and class
designation in each dormitory. How would you select a cluster sample?