Round all decimals answers to 3 decimals places if necessary

Question

The first 100 people to go to a minnesota Vikings football game (out of the 60,000 who attended the game) are given a survey asking them to evaluate the parking situation at the game. Is this a valid survey to reach any conclusions about the parking situations for minnesota Vikings games? Explain your answer

Answer 1

Notes:

 

  The parking situation is absolutely not the same for each of the 60,000 people who attend the game.  The distribution of experience is clearly not linear; it is not exponential; it is not ...;  but it does get worse quickly as the available space fills up (if it does).  We don't know whether it fills up from the problem statement.

 

  Whatever the parking experience, the "first 100" people would be expected to have the best experience (this is a conclusion about the parking situation, but is doesn't represent anything else) because they have access to the most parking space (and, therefore, the best choices).  This makes their opinion quite biased (and not a good statistical indicator of any other parking experience or of the overall parking experience).

 

  Now, since the "first 100" people have the best experience, we can infer that the other 59,900 had a worse experience.  If the "first 100" did not have an acceptable experience (for example, say, because of nearby construction), then we infer that it only got worse after that (but we have no measure of that).  This is not a statistical inference; it is simply interpreting the words "first" and "best."

Answer 2

Hi Azza, here the best method is to employ some common sense to think through the implications of the survey method. The first 100 people to the game are not likely to encounter parking difficulties because they arrived when the lots were likely empty.