Question

You have measured the systolic blood pressure of a random sample of 25 employees of a company located near you. A 95% confidence interval for the mean systolic blood pressure for the employees of this company is (122, 138). Which of the following statements gives a valid interpretation of the confidence level?
a. 95% of the sample of employees have a systolic blood pressure between 122 and 138.
b. 95% of the population of employees have a systolic blood pressure between 122 and 138.
c. If the procedure were repeated many times, 95% of the resulting confidence intervals would contain the population mean systolic blood pressure.
d. The probability that the population mean blood pressure is between 122 and 138 is .95

Answer 1

Answer:

$122 \leq \mu \leq 138$

The 95% confidence interval would be given by (122;138)

And the correct interpretation for this case is:

c. If the procedure were repeated many times, 95% of the resulting confidence intervals would contain the population mean systolic blood pressure.

Step-by-step explanation:

Previous concepts

A confidence interval is "a range of values that’s likely to include a population value with a certain degree of confidence. It is often expressed a % where by a population means lies between an upper and lower interval".  

The margin of error is the range of values below and above the sample statistic in a confidence interval.  

Normal distribution, is a "probability distribution that is symmetric about the mean, showing that data near the mean are more frequent in occurrence than data far from the mean".  

Solution to the problem

The confidence interval for the mean is given by the following formula:  

$\bar X \pm t_{\alpha/2}\frac{s}{\sqrt{n}}$ (1)  

In order to calculate the critical value $t_{\alpha/2}$ we need to find first the degrees of freedom, given by:  

$df=n-1=25-1=24$  

Since the Confidence is 0.95 or 95%, the value of $\alpha=0.05$ and $\alpha/2 =0.025$, and we can use excel, a calculator or a table to find the critical value. The excel command would be: "=-T.INV(0.025,24)".And we see that $t_{\alpha/2}=2.06$  

Now we have everything in order to replace into formula (1), for this case we got:

$122 \leq \mu \leq 138$

The 95% confidence interval would be given by (122;138)

And the correct interpretation for this case is:

c. If the procedure were repeated many times, 95% of the resulting confidence intervals would contain the population mean systolic blood pressure.