Number of Letters in Your First Name

We took a survey from our statistics class and asked the students how many letters were
in their first name. We only received a sample of responses, rather an entire population of
responses because of absent students. With that said, our sample size, or n, was 24 students.
From our data set, we found that the lowest amount of letters in the student’s name was 4, and
the maximum was 9. For the most part, our data was normally distributed. After analyzing and
calculating the responses, we found that the sample mean, or X , equaled 5.79, meaning that on
average, most students in our statistics class had around 5-6 letters in their first name. Once we
found X , we were able to calculate the sample standard deviation, or s. We found that the
measure of the spread of our data equaled 1.35.
In order to continue on with our calculations, we needed to identify the degrees of
freedom. With our sample size, we were able to use the equation d . f .=n−1, making the degrees
of freedom to be 23. Throughout Chapter 8, we often used the tables in the back of the book to
help us solve our equations. The table that we need for this project in particular is Table 4
because sigma is unknown. We were asked to find the critical values, or t c, for 90%, 95%, and
99%. Those percentages are confidence levels, or c, for our data. Using Table 4, we traced
d . f .=¿23 and c=¿0.90 and found that t c =¿1.714. Next, we traced d . f .=¿23 and c=¿0.95 and
found that t c =¿ 2.069. Lastly, we traced d . f .=¿23 and c=¿0.99 and found that t c =¿2.807.
Knowing the critical values will help us find the amounts of error in our data, which will lead to
helping us find the confidence level intervals.
The first step in finding the confidence level intervals for 90%, 95%, and 99% was to find
the critical values for each confidence level. After finding these values, we had to find the
margin of error in which we use the equation E=t c∗s / √❑. For c = 0.90, the margin of error was
calculated at 0.4723 letters, for c = 0.95, we got E = 0.5701 letters, and for c = 0.99, the margin
of error equaled 0.7735 letters. What these numbers mean is that we are willing to give that
many letters on both sides of the mean in order to be confident in our interval for where the mean
is. We noticed that as our confidence level increased, so did the amount of error that we were
willing to give on each side of the interval. By subtracting and adding the error to the mean of
5.79, our interval for 90% confidence was 5.3177 <μ< 6.2623. This means that we are 90%
confident that the average amount of letters that someone has in their name is between 5.3177
and 6.2623. For a 95% confidence, we subtracted and added our amount of error (0.5701) to the
mean and got an interval of 5.2199 < μ< 6.3601. This means that we are 95% confident that the
average number of letters that someone has in their name is between 5.2199 and 6.3601. The last
interval that we had to calculate was for 99% confidence. Using our margin of error of 0.7735,
we added and subtracted it from our mean of 5.79 and we obtained an interval of 5.0165 < μ<
6.5635. What this means is that we are 99% confident that the average number of letters that
someone has in their name is between 5.0165 and 6.5635. The more decimal places that we
round to, the more accurate the interval will be.
Because we were not given σ , the population standard deviation, we had to use equations
specific to using s, or sample standard deviation, we had to identify the degrees of freedom, and
we had to use Table 4 with t c. Our equation for error was also different because of the unknown
sigma. If we would have been given σ , we would have had a simpler process to find error, the
confidence interval, and the proper sample size. We also would have used Table 3 with the
critical value z c. Our calculations may have been slightly different based on the sigma.