Question

1. The company XYZ has 309456 employees and 539144 stockholders. A vice president plants to conduct a survey to study the number of shares held by individual stockholders. (a) Are the numbers of shares held by stockholders discrete or continuous? (b) Identify the level of measurement for the numbers of shares held by stockholders? (c) If 1000 stockholders is obtained, the mean number of shares is calculated, is the result a statistic or parameter? (d) If the survey is conducted by telephoning 30 randomly selected stockholders in each of the state of Malaysia, what type of sampling is being used?

Answer 1

(a) Are the numbers of shares held by stockholders discrete or continuous? Number of shares held is a discrete data. Discrete data is data that has distinguishable spaces between values. Þften it is data that is counted. (b) Identify the level of measurement for the numbers of shares held by stockholders? The level of management is Ratio. A ratio scale has an order, a set value between units, and absolute zero. It's an interval scale with a true zero. Number of shares can be true zero. (c) If 1000 stockholders is obtained, the mean number of shares is calculated, is the result a statistic or parameter? The result is a statistic. A statistic is a descriptive measure computed from a sample of data'. A parameter is a descriptive measure computed from an entire population of data'. (d) If the survey is conducted by telephoning 30 randomly selected stockholders in each of the state of Malaysia, what type of sampling is being used? The type of sampling used here is stratified sampling. Stratified sampling is a method of sampling from a population which can be partitioned into subpopulations. Here states are the subpopulations.