Question

3. One thing that often surprises San Diego newcomers is how present the U.S. military is here. As a statistician at DQ Industries, your boss has tasked you with finding the proportion of San Diego jobs that are connected to the military (this includes jobs at bases, contractors, military R & D, etc.). You are required to draw a large-enough sample so that the sample proportion will be within 1.5% of the true value 90% of the time. a. Suppose you have no information about this proportion and that it costs S5 to contact each person in your sample. What is the least amount of money you can spend to meet your requirements? b. Your boss is horrified by the cost estimate in part a. You decide to do some Google searching to get an estimate for the proportion. At www.sdmac.org, you see that 1 in 5 jobs in San Diego is linked to the military sector. Since this is a pro-military group, you figure this number can serve as an upper bound on the true proportion. What is the new minimal cost estimate?

Answer 1

We are to estimate the sample size and then estimate the cost to contact each person in the sample.