Question

A sample of students from the University of Florida was surveyed on a variety of topics. The variable of interest for now is

• life_after_death (whether the student believes in life after death: y = yes, n = no, u =unsure)

1. There are three possible responses for whether students believe in life after death. What are the null and alternative hypotheses for testing whether students believe in an afterlife at a rate greater than chance

2. What are the assumptions required for testing the hypotheses in (1)? Have they been satisfied?

Justify

Answer 1

1) The hypothesis are:

H0: The students believe in an afterlife at a rate that is close to chance.

H1: The students believe in an afterlife at a rate greater than chance.

2) The assumptions required of rtesting the above hypothesis are:

a) The data should be in whole numbers and not in percentages or any other form. In this case the data constitutes the number of students who gave the responses y, n and u.

b) The categories should be mutually exclusive. In this case any student can only give only one of the three responses and cannot be part of more than one category of yes, no and unsure.

c) Te subject can only contribute once to the data. In this case any student will have only one response instead of multiple responses fitting in diffrent categories.

d) The categories must be measured in nominal terms. In this case the responses are qualitative and each category counts the number of a particular response.