DBA 8100 Business Administration

Question 1

1. Median has been used to summary the family income since there may be some families that would be very wealthy and hence distort the mean. The median is not impacted by these extreme values and would present a more faithful representation of the average family income.
2. The key disadvantage of using the mean to report family income would be that the value would be inflated owing to a small minority of super wealthy families. Thus, the resultant value would not represent a reasonable summary of the census data with regards to family income (Eriksson. & Kovalainen, 2015).

Question 2

The standard deviation presents an indication of the deviation to the mean. It would be better from the quality perspective that the deviation is smaller which would imply that the players tend to broadly comply with the stated quality standard. Hence, standard deviation of 2 months would be preferred as it would minimise incidents involving when the MP3 player lifetime is significantly lesser than 5 years. This is because for any positive deviation in the life of the player, the customers would not explain. But is there is any significant negative deviation from 5 years like if the MP3 player stops working after 3-3.5 years it would lead to customer dissatisfaction. With the standard deviation limited to only 2 months, the probability of MP3 player lifetime being lesser than 4.5 years is almost zero (Flick, 2015).

Question 3

1. It would not be prudent to conclude that height tends to have a significant impact on the reading skills. This is because in the given relation, external variables may be at play. One of these would be the underlying grades of the students. It would be natural to expect that students who are taller would potentially belong to higher grades and the better reading skills may be more related to higher grades in which the students are studying rather than the height (Hair et. al., 2015).

1. The correlation as explained above is more on account of the differential grades that the students would be in. The students in higher grade would be older and hence would have potentially more height as compared to those in lower grades. The reading skills of the students tend to improve with grades and hence it is observed that students who are taller would have superior reading skills.

Question 4

The appropriate explanation for this is that the sportsperson who tend to figure on the cover page tend to those who tend to have exceptional performance. This is far from the average performance. However, in the next year, there performance would be closer to the mean performance and thus appear less stellar. Therefore, the performance of the players is actually relative and depends on the deviation from the mean performance.  Since, a significant positive deviation from the mean performance is difficult to sustain, hence it seems as though there is a jinx (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2015).

References

Eriksson, P. & Kovalainen, A. (2015). Quantitative methods in business research (3^rd ed.). London: Sage Publications.

Flick, U. (2015). Introducing research methodology: A beginner's guide to doing a research project (4^th ed.). New York: Sage Publications.

Hair, J. F., Wolfinbarger, M., Money, A. H., Samouel, P., & Page, M. J. (2015). Essentials of business research methods (2^nd ed.). New York: Routledge.