Case Problem: A Bipartisan Agenda for Change
In a study conducted by Zogby International, more than 700 New Yorkers were polled to determine whether the New York state government works. Respondents surveyed were asked questions involving pay cuts for state legislators, restrictions on lobbyists, term limits for legislators, and whether state citizens should be able to put matters directly on the state ballot for a vote. The results regarding several proposed reforms had broad support, crossing all demographic and political lines.
Suppose that a follow-up survey of 100 individuals who live in the western region of New York was conducted. The party affiliation (Democrat, Republican, Independent) of each individual surveyed was recorded, as well as their responses to the following 3 questions.
A) Should legislative pay be cut for every day the state budget is late? Yes or No.
B) Should there be more restrictions on lobbyists? Yes or No.
C) Should there be term limits requiring that legislators can only serve a fixed number of years? Yes or No.
Their responses were coded using 1 for yes and 0 for no. The complete data set is in the Excel worksheet called Bipartisan case NYReform data.
For your managerial report, you must answer the following questions.
1. Use descriptive statistics to summarize the data from this study. What preliminary conclusions do you draw about the independence of the response (yes or no) and party affiliation for each of the three questions in the survey?
2. With regard to question A, test for the independence of the response (yes or no) and party affiliation. Use alpha = .05.
3. With regard to question B test for the independence of the response (yes or no) and party affiliation. Use alpha = .05.
4. With regard to question C, test for the independence of the response (yes or no) and party affiliation. Use alpha = .05.
5. Does it appear that there is broad support for change across all political lines? Explain in detail.
Hint: Consider Chapter 11. ?2
You must perform each hypothesis test using ALL of the steps below.
Procedure to use for hypothesis testing.
1- State your hypotheses (Ho and Ha) in terms of the population, not the sample. This means you should be using Greek letters.
2- State the value of alpha for your test.
3- Describe, in words, your rejection region, based on your value of alpha and state the rejection rule for your test. Your rejection region is defined by the critical value (from the table or Excel), which is based on your value of alpha.
4- Calculate your test statistic.
5- State the decision that you make, i.e. determine if your test statistic lies in the rejection region or not. If it is in the rejection region you will Reject Ho. If it is not in the rejection region you will Fail to Reject Ho.
6- Calculate your p-value (the probability of observing the data that we analyzed). If the p-value is less than alpha, we Reject Ho. Otherwise, we Fail to Reject Ho.
7- State your conclusion in the context of the problem.