Question

What is the difference between the way we calculate the margin of error for population proportion and population mean?

Answer 1

The main difference can be directly observed in the formulas used to calculate for the margin of error.

For the population mean, the margin of error would simply be:

MOE = z * s / sqrt(n)
where z is the z-score, s is the standard deviation and n is the number of samples

 

For the population proportion, the margin of error is:

MOE = z * sqrt[p (1 – p) / n]

where p is the probability of success