Question

The California State University (CSU) system consists of 23 campuses, from San Diego State in the south to Humboldt State near the Oregon border. A CSU administrator wishes to make an inference about the average distance between the hometowns of students and their campuses. Describe and discuss several different sampling methods that might be employed. Would this be an enumerative or an analytic study? Explain yourreasoning.

Short answer

Simple Random sampling and stratified sampling techniques can be used.

This is an enumerative study since the data may be used to create an actionable item by the CSU administrator.

Step-by-step solution

Given information

The number of campuses that the California State University system consists of is 23.

A CSU administrator wishes to make an inference about the average distance between the hometowns of students and their campuses.

State the sampling methods that can be employed.

The sampling methods that can be used in the provided scenario are,

Simple Random sampling: Randomly selecting the distance between the hometowns of students and their campuses will eliminate the biases.

Stratified random sampling: This method can be used treating 23 campuses as subgroups and then taking samples from them.

Identify the study

In enumerative study, the population under study is finite and seek to provide numerical summaries, conduct tests to give inference about the proposed claim.

Here, A CSU administrator is interested to study the average distance from hometown to campus.

Using these results, he will take the required steps to minimize the distance by changing students from one to other. The action taken by him using the obtained results comes under enumerative study.