Question

A sample of eight workers in a clothing manufacturing company gave the following figures for the amount of time(in minutes) needed to join a collar to a shirt11 13 14 10 9 16 11 12Construct a 95% confidence interval for the true mean amount of time needed to join a collar.

Answer 1

Answer:

$10.108 < \mu < 13.892$    

Step-by-step explanation:

1) 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 % whereby 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".

$\bar X$ represent the sample mean for the sample  

$\mu$ population mean (variable of interest)

s represent the sample standard deviation

n represent the sample size  

We have the following distribution for the random variable:

$X \sim N(\mu , \sigma=0.45)$

And by the central theorem we know that the distribution for the sample mean is given by:

$\bar X \sim N(\mu, \frac{\sigma}{\sqrt{n}})$

2) Confidence interval

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 mean and the sample deviation we can use the following formulas:  

$\bar X= \sum_{i=1}^n \frac{x_i}{n}$ (2)  

$s=\sqrt{\frac{\sum_{i=1}^n (x_i-\bar X)}{n-1}}$ (3)  

The mean calculated for this case is $\bar X=12$

The sample deviation calculated $s=2.268$

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

$df=n-1=8-1=7$

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 tabel to find the critical value. The excel command would be: "=-T.INV(0.025,7)".And we see that $t_{\alpha/2}=2.36$

Now we have everything in order to replace into formula (1):

$12-2.36\frac{2.268}{\sqrt{8}}=10.108$    

$12+2.36\frac{2.268}{\sqrt{8}}=13.892$

So on this case the 95% confidence interval would be given by (10.108;13.892)

$10.108 < \mu < 13.892$