Recall exercise 5.2.29 about the use of incentives to encourage people to participate in a telephone survey. A team of researchers (Singer et al., 2000) used the Survey of Consumer Attitudes to investigate whether incentives would improve the response rates on telephone surveys. A national sample of 735 households was randomly selected, and all 735 of the households were sent an €œadvance letter€ explaining that the household would be contacted shortly for a telephone survey. However, 368 households were randomly assigned to receive a monetary incentive along with the advance letter, and the other 367 households were assigned to receive only the advance letter. Here are the data on how many households responded to the telephone survey.

a. Define the parameters of interest. Assign symbols to these parameters.
b. State the appropriate null and alternative hypotheses in words.
c. State the appropriate null and alternative hypotheses in symbols.
d. Explain why it would be okay to use the theory-based method (that is, normal distribution based method) to find a p-value and confidence interval for this study.
e. Use an appropriate applet to find and report the following from the data:
€¢ The standardized statistic
€¢ The theory-based p-value
€¢ The theory-based 95% confidence interval
f. Include a screenshot of the applet output in your report.
g. Interpret the p-value in the context of the study.
h. Interpret the 95% confidence interval in the context of the study.
i. State a complete conclusion about this study, including significance, estimation (confidence interval), causation, and generalization. Be sure to explain how you are arriving at your conclusion.

Data from exercise 5.2.29

A team of researchers (Singer et al., 2000) used the Survey of Consumer Attitudes to investigate whether incentives would improve the response rates on telephone surveys. A national sample of 735 households was randomly selected, and all 735 of the households were sent an €œadvance letter€ explaining that the household would be contacted shortly for a telephone survey. However, 368 households were randomly assigned to receive a monetary incentive along with the advance letter, and of these 286 responded to the telephone survey. Th e other 367 households were assigned to receive only the advance letter, and of these 245 responded to the telephone survey.

Transcribed Image Text:

Received an incentive? Yes No Total Yes 286 245 531 Responded to the telephone survey? No 82 122 204 Total 368 367 735