The American Time Use Survey is a survey of adult Americans conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The purpose of the survey is to learn how Americans allocate their time in a day. As a reporter for the school newspaper, you wish to file a report that compares the typical student at your school to other Americans.
1. Go to the American Time Use Survey web page. Research variables of interest to you (or that you believe would be of interest to your readers). Determine the mean amount of time Americans who are enrolled in school spend doing the activities you find interesting.
2. Use StatCrunch or an online polling site (such as surveymonkey.com) to conduct a survey of a random sample of students at your school. Write questions to learn how students at your school use their time. For example, how much time does a student at your school spend attending class each day? Be very careful about the wording in your survey questions to avoid confusion about what is being asked.
3. For each question, describe the sampling distribution of the sample means. Use the national norms as the population means for each variable. Use the sample standard deviation from your survey sample as the population standard deviation.
4. Compute probabilities regarding values of the statistics obtained from the study. Are any of the results unusual?
5. Write an article for your newspaper reporting your findings. Be sure any interpretations are written so they are statistically accurate, but understandable for the statistically untrained reader.