Customer orders at a department store. A department store receives customer orders through its call center and website. These orders, as well as any special orders received in the stores are forwarded to a distribution center where workers pull the items on the orders from inventory, pack them, and prepare the necessary paperwork for the shipping company that will pick up the packages and deliver them to the customers. In order to monitor the subprocess of pulling the items from inventory, one order is checked every 15 minutes to determine whether the worker has pulled the correct item.

a. Identify the process of interest.

b. Identify the variable of interest. Is it quantitative or qualitative?

c. Describe the sample.

d. Describe the inference of interest.

e. How likely is the sample to be representative?

Short Answer

Expert verified

a. Taking care of the orders of the customers from the time that the store is receiving an order to providing it to the shipping company.

b. The variable is that the worker has pulled the item correctly; qualitative.

c. The group of all orders that are verified every 15 minutes

d. The number of all orders that are pulled correctly or incorrectly

e. Quite likely

Step by step solution

01

Identifying the process of interest

The processof interest represents the procedure that is useful for the researcher here; it isfulfilling the orders.All the steps included in the method of providing the orders, beginning from getting the order, are then sent to the distribution center. Then workers prepare the order and provide it to the shipping company.

02

Determining the variable of interest and specifying whether it is qualitative or quantitative

The variable or the altering element in this population is whetherthe worker has correctly pulled out the order or not. Thispulling out of order correctly or incorrectly is non-numeric; moreover demonstrates the quality; hence it is a qualitative variable.

03

Indicating the sample

The sample is a batch extracted from the population. In this case, it is thebatch of all orders inspected after 15 minutes.

04

Specifying the inference of interest

The inferences represent the procedure to analyze data to understand the properties of the population. In this case, it isthe total number of all the orders pulled by the workers, whether these orders are drawn correctly or not.

05

Demonstrating that the sample is representative.

One order is reviewed every 15 minutes; hence the order is picked up randomly. When the items are selected randomly from the population, each item can be picked and inspected; thus, it isquite likely that the sample is a representative sample.

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Most popular questions from this chapter

Monitoring product quality. The Wallace Company of Houston is a distributor of pipes, valves, and fittings to the refining, chemical, and petrochemical industries. The company was a recent winner of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. One of the steps the company takes to monitor the quality of its distribution process is to send out a survey twice a year to a subset of its current customers, asking the customers to rate the speed of deliveries, the accuracy of invoices, and the quality of the packaging of the products they have received from Wallace.

a. Describe the process studied.

b. Describe the variables of interest.

c. Describe the sample.

d. Describe the inferences of interest.

e. What are some of the factors that are likely to affect the reliability of the inferences?

Zillow.com estimates of home values. Zillow.com is a real estate Web site that provides free estimates of the market value of homes. A trio of University of Texas at San Antonio professors compared Zillow estimates to actual sale prices of homes and published their results in The Appraisal Journal (Winter 2010). The analysis was based on data collected for 2,045 single-family residential properties in Arlington, Texas, that sold during the last 6 months of 2006. Sale price and Zillow estimated value (in dollars) were measured for each property. Zillow claims that this market has one of its highest-accuracy ratings. However, the research revealed that Zillow overestimated the market value by more than 10% for nearly half of the properties.

a. What is the experimental unit for this study?

b. Describe the variables measured in the study. Do these variables produce quantitative or qualitative data?

c. Give a scenario where the 2,045 properties represent a population.

d. If the 2,045 properties represent a representative sample from a population, describe the population.

e. Suppose the relevant population is all single-family residential properties in the United States. Do you believe the 2,045 properties are representative of this population? Explain.

Suppose that a production batch contains 1,000 units and you have to select 10 units for quality assurance. Use a random number generator to select a simple random sample of n = 10 from the production batch.

Guilt in decision making. The effect of guilt emotion on how a decision maker focuses on the problem was investigated in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (January 2007). A total of 171 volunteer students participated in the experiment, where each was randomly assigned to one of three emotional states (guilt, anger, or neutral) through a reading/writing task. Immediately after the task, the students were presented with a decision problem (e.g., whether or not to spend money on repairing a very old car). The researchers found that a higher proportion of students in the guilty-state group chose to repair the car than those in the neutral-state and anger-state groups.

a. Identify the population, sample, and variables measured for this study.

b. Identify the data-collection method used.

c. What inference was made by the researcher?

d. In later chapters you will learn that the reliability of an inference is related to the size of the sample used. In addition to sample size, what factors might affect the reliability of the inference drawn in this study?

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