Question: This assignment has to do with polls and surveys. This is perhaps one of the most common applications of statistics. Surveys and polls are done in economics, business, health, social sciences, education, etc. Sciences such as biology also use these methods although usually in a different context. (What percentage of deer survived the winter?)

All of these questions involve proportions, which is a statistical term for percentages. You will need the following topics from the book to answer the questions:

Confidence interval for one proportion

Confidence interval for difference of two proportions

Sample size for proportions

Hypothesis Test, one proportion

Hypothesis Test, independent samples, difference of two proportions

Here is the link for the Alaskan portion of a recent US Census Bureau survey:

http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Products/Profiles/Chg/2003/ACS/AK.htm

Have a look around. There is a lot there, and maybe you will find material for your own project.

I downloaded data from Table 3, "Economic Characteristics". For interest take a look at the original spreadsheet. This entire assignment has to do with the unemployment rates. Obviously there is way more here than this. You could feel free to do your project from this survey if you like.

Proportions can be presented as a percentage, ie 5%, or as a relative frequency, ie 0.05.

First before a survey is done, it is wise to compute sample size requirements.

This sort of thing is discussed in chap. 8. Find the sample size formula for proportions. Suppose we wish to estimate the unemployment rate in Alaska. Eventually we will be computing a 95% confidence interval for the unemployment rate. When we go on TV, and announce the unemployment rate, we would like to be less than 1.5% from the true unemployment rate. What sample size would be required to accomplish this?