Research Methods 2

Week 7: Practical use of Standard Errors: Confidence Intervals

Aims

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

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.

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

• Study the document How to use the standard error: Confidence Intervals, from the Learning Materials folder, which explains what a Confidence Interval is.
• Try the questions in Exercise Sheet 1, which is in the Formative Assessment Activities folder.

{to download the Minitab macro for question 3 click here.}
• You should check your answers by referring to the Solutions to Exercise Sheet 1 in the Formative Assessment Activities.