Poverty

Poverty:

If we were to undertake a study on poverty and we want to find out why people are poor then we would test the hypothesis whether there is a relationship between poverty and parents economic class. The population in this case will be the entire individuals who are in the lower economic class. Participants will be randomly selected using a random generator from the population. The methodology that will be used to test this hypothesis is testing the mean of those responses that accept that they are poor because of their parent’s economic class and testing whether this mean is greater than zero.

Health:

In health we could undertake a study where we will try to find out the effectiveness of a certain type drug on patients, the population of this study will be those affected by a certain disease or illnesses, we will then adopt a sample which will selected randomly and respondents half of the respondents given the drug under study while the other half will be given other drugs, the hypothesis therefore will be test whether the new drug is more effective than other drugs. We will therefore test whether the mean of those taking the drug is greater than the mean of those who use other drugs.

Poverty

Biasness in the study may occur whereby we might select a small sample to undertake this study, however this may be avoided by selecting a larger sample, another type of bias that may occur is the type one and type two error where we reject our hypothesis when we are supposed to accept hypothesis or when we accept the hypothesis when we are supposed to reject it, this can be avoided by proper statement of hypothesis to be tested and also the use of appropriate critical value when testing. Other types of errors in the study may occur due to improper setting of questions in the questionnaire, these errors can be minimised by pre testing of questionnaires before the study.

References:

Bluman A. (2000) Elementary Statistics: A Step by Step Approach, McGraw Hill press, New York