Help with my dissertation

Question

So I need to estimate the people who eats in a certain food court daily. I counted the number of seats which 200, but the problem is what is the probability that this 200 seats will be occupied. Please help. Thank you ver much.

Answer 1

You would need some data to even estimate something like that. One idea would be to talk to mall management (I doubt they even track that but you never know).  If that fails, then you'll have to do it yourself.  Two ways you can do it:

 

1) Stake out the food court a few times a day for a couple of days and count the number of empty seats.  This is very time consuming so you might also consider...

 

2) Pay a security guard to do this for you.  Have them count the number of empty chairs a few times per day.  You could also see if the mall has one of those survey places in it because you'll often see the survey recruiters hanging out by the food court all day. I'm sure they wouldn't mind making a few extra bucks just to count seats for you.

 

Once you have some data, we might be able to help you more.