|
Is there a difference in male / female smoking habits?
The data from our suvey are shown at the left; the summary is above.
(I used the =countif(range,text) Excel function to do the counting.
Or you could sort the
entries and subtract column numbers.)
Procedure: difference of percentages.
p1 = fraction of males who smoke
p2 = fraction of females who smoke
H0: the percentage of smokers is the same for males and females.
p1 = p2
Halpha: the percentages are different. (two tail)
Standard deviation of percentage is sqrt(p*(1-p)/N)
which gives sigma_p1 = 0.07521, sigma_p2 = 0.07526.
Standard deviation
of the difference is sqrt( s1^2 + s2^2 ) = 0.10
Choosing significance level alpha=0.01, our two-tail cutoff is
given by NORMINV(0.995, 0, 0.10) = 0.26. In other words,
a normal variable with mean=0 and sigma=0.1 is in
the
range (-0.26 < x < 0.26) 99% of the time.
Our decision rule is to reject the null hypothesis
if p1-p2 is >0.26 or p1-p2 is < -0.26.
The result is that p1-p2 = 0.32 - 0.27 = 0.05,
and we fail to reject the null hypothesis.
Therefore from this data we can *not* conclude that
there is a difference in the smoking habits
of male and female Marlboro students.
(At least, not at the 99% signficance
level.)
The confidence intervals give the same intuition;
at 2sigma (95%), p1=0.32+-0.14; p2=0.27+-0.14.
These ranges overlap, and so the two don't look all that different.
|
|