Data Collection Statistics Example 3

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Example 3

easy
A town council wants to know whether residents support building a new park. They place a survey form in the local library. Give one reason this method might produce biased results and suggest an improvement.

Solution

  1. 1
    Step 1: Only people who visit the library will see the survey, so the sample is not representative of all residents.
  2. 2
    Step 2: An improvement would be to mail the survey to a random selection of households or conduct door-to-door interviews.

Answer

The library-only method is biased because it excludes residents who do not visit the library. Mailing surveys to random households would be more representative.
Voluntary response and location-based sampling often lead to bias in data collection. Random sampling helps ensure every member of the population has an equal chance of being included.

About Data Collection

The systematic process of gathering information to answer questions, using methods like surveys, experiments, or observations.

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