Module 4 Discussion Question

150 – 200 words

Message from professor: In order to complete this assignment you needed to provide follow up posts on two classmates’ posts and I don’t see those. Make sure to do that this coming week so that you will be eligible for all of the points.

Module 4 discussion:

In your initial post, describe a situation when you thought about the value of a measurement and stated a conclusion about the likelihood that it is true. For example, you may have said that you are very sure that the average time it takes for you to drive to work each morning is less than 30 minutes. Comment on your classmates’ posts to further discuss the challenges of testing numeric claims. Also discuss how understanding Type I and Type II errors is useful.

Here would be an example of a successful answer to the prompt:

I am going to explore the percentage of the time people in my town walk to work. My quantitative variable is the percentage of time that people walk to work.

Null hypothesis: People in my town walk to work 50% of the time.

Alternate hypothesis: People in my town walk to work less than 50% of the time.

I would take data over the course of a year for 500 people in my town. I would calculate the percentage of the time they walk to work. I would have 500 data points, all percentages. Then I can perform my hypothesis test.

Type one error: I would reject the null hypothesis, incorrectly. In this case I would say that people in my town walk to work less than 50% of the time when in fact they walk to work about 50% of the time.

Type two error: I would reject the alternate hypothesis, incorrectly. In this case I would say that people walk to work about 50% of the time, when in fact they walk less than that.