Statistics task

Question

The production department of ABC electronics wants to explore the relationship between the number of employees who assembled an electrical panel and the number produced. As an experiment, two employees were assigned to assemble the electrical panels. They produced 15 during a one hour period. Then four employees assembled them. They produced 25 during one hour period. The complete set of paired observations follows.

number of

assemblers: 2 | 4 | 1 | 5 | 3

one hour

production: 15 | 25 | 10 | 40 | 30

• describe the independent and dependent variable

• compute the coefficient of correlations and describe the results of the findings

• describe the pattern and characteristics of the data

Answer 1

The independent variable accounts for, explains, predicts, or somehow is responsible for the dependent variable. The number of people working explains the number produced. So, the independent variable is the number of assemblers. The dependent variable is the number produced.

The formula for the correlation coefficient is (sum of the z-scores of x and sum of the z-scores of y) / (sample size - 1). As you can see, it's much easier to use R or a TI-84 than calculate it by hand.

Entering the data into R, I find the correlation coefficient is 0.9271726.

The direction is positive, the form is pretty much straight, and there's a strong association. Hope this helps