Question

What’s Wrong? In Exercises 25–28, identify what is wrong.

Healthy Water In a USA Today online poll, 951 Internet users chose to respond, and 57% of them said that they prefer drinking bottled water instead of tap water.

Short answer

The samples are collected through voluntary response sampling.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

In an online poll for USA Today, 57% responded in preference of bottled water.

951 internet users chose to participate in the poll.

The sampling procedure

The sampling must fulfill two characteristics: largely sized and true representative of the population to obtain reliable results.

If the sampling method is non-random, the sample may become biased. It will result in a set of sample observations that do not accurately represent the population.

Identifying the wrong element in the survey

The sampling method isvoluntary response sampling.

In the poll, the internet users responded through an online poll and volunteered for the sampling.

It creates a non-random sample of internet users, which may produce inappropriate results.

Thus, the voluntary response sampling approach is wrong in the study.