Aresearcher wishes to estimate the proportion of all adults who own a cell phone. he takes a random sample of 1,572 adults; 1,298 of them own a cell phone, hence 1298∕1572 ≈ .83 or about 83% own a cell phone. what is the population of interest? what is the parameter of interest? what is the statistic involved? based on this sample, do we know the proportion of all adults who own a cell phone? explain fully.

solution:

a) The population of interest is all the adults

b) The parameter of interest is p, the proportion of adults who own a cell phone

c) The statistic is the proportion, p^, of the sample of 1572 adults who own a cell phone. The value of the sample proportion is 0.83.

d) We dont the the exact proportion with 100 % but we know that the proportion would lie in a certain range with certain degree of confidence