1. You are the principal of a large urban high school and wish to do a parent survey to determine how parents feel about same-sex classes. Your budget does not allow you to send out surveys to all parents. You are considering one of two procedures. Please critique each procedure for its likelihood of getting good data that will adequately represent the entire population of parents of your students.
– Send out a paper survey in the US mail complete with a returned self-addressed and stamped envelope for its return. Send it to the home address of every 10th parent on a listing of all parents in the district.
– Use simple random sampling procedures to select one half of the parents on a listing of email addresses that about 3/4th of parents have provided you.
2. You are a curator of a museum and wish to know which of your displays draws the most viewers. You are considering 3 data collection methods. Which do you feel would be the most likely to bring you reliable data and also contain your costs.
– Install video cameras and ask volunteers to your museum to video the recorded videos and count visitors at each display. The procedure would be to watch the tape and count visitors for the first 15 minutes of each hour the museum was open on alternate days of the week (Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday)
– Install special tiles in front of each display that quickly wear down for a period of one week then measure and compare wear
– Interview the docents of each display at the end of the Sunday showing and ask them to estimate the number of adults and children at the display they are monitoring along with the amount of time viewers are spending
3. You have a new child in your school who is displaying very unusual and very varied behavior patterns. You determine to do a case study on the child to document the various behaviors as well as to try to help you understand the child’s motivations for the behaviors. Your data collection will include classroom, lunchroom, and playground observations; interviews with a variety of school personnel (classroom teachers, psychologist, janitor), and a review of the document sent from the last 2 schools this child attended.