CHAPTER 10 PROJECT

The data that my partner and I received was from page 455 in our class book
from number 14. The data values represent a birth rate and death rate from a
1000-resident population, so we can call it a paired differences problem. This will be
useful because as we solve the problem, we can assume that we know .
The first information we found when solving this problem is the basic descriptions
to our data set. These would be the null hypothesis, alternative hypothesis, level of
significance, and d . The null hypothesis is said to be that there is no difference between
the pairs (p1 = p2). The alternate hypothesis would be the data sets are different from
one another (p1 =/ p1). It is not stated as to whether p1 is less than or greater than p2 so
we assume that they are simply not equal to one another. The level of significance is
stated with the data set we were provided, = 0.01. One more important contributor to
the problem is the d . This variable is said to be the mean difference and is calculated
by subtracting each pair and then finding the average of those differences. Our d is
-1.1.
The information my partner and I found next is the sample test statistic and the
p-value. This part was a little more time consuming as the equation for the sample test
statistic is quite large. The equation my partner and I used is t= d ( n/s ). In this equation
the d is the difference in the means, the n is the number of data points, and the s is the
standard deviation. When plugging all of our numbers into the equation and solving, my
partner and I received t=-1.1( 16/3.75) =-1.17. Next we looked at table 4 to help us find
the students t distribution. In order to find this value, we had to use the values t=-1.17
and d.f.=15. (The d.f. stands for degrees of freedom and is found by the equation n-1.)
My partner and I then discovered that the p-value is between 0.250 and 0.500.
The final step in this problem is to interpret the results and we do this by
comparing the level of significance and the p-value. In order to reject the null
hypothesis, we had to receive a p-value lower than 0.01. Since this did not happen my
partner and I fail to reject the null hypothesis, which means we conclude that there is no
difference between the birth rate and death rate in the Midwest.