Research Methods 2

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Topic 7: Practical use of Standard Errors: Confidence Intervals (Week 7)

Aims

To understand how to use confidence intervals to include a measure of precision when estimating population means.

Objectives

To understand how the properties of the Normal distribution and the standard error can be combined to construct a confidence interval

To understand what a confidence interval is and how the '95%' gets into a 95% confidence interval

To be able to compute a 95% confidence interval for a variable with a Normal distribution.

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This week there is one document to be studied and one exercise sheet.  .

• Study the document How to use the standard error: Confidence Intervals, which explains what a Confidence Interval is.
• Answer the questions in Exercise Sheet 1.

{to download the Minitab macro for question 3 right-click here and choose 'Save Target As...'}

• You should check your answers by referring to the Solutions to Exercise Sheet 1.

Further reading on the topics addressed this week can be found in Bland, sections 8.3 and 10.2

You can now attempt the second set of formative true/false questions.