Question

The concept of a "phantom smoker" was introduced in the paper "I Smoke but I Am Not a Smoker: Phantom Smokers and the Discrepancy Between Self-Identity and Behavior" (Journal of American College Health [2010]: \(117-125\) ). Previous studies of college students found that how students respond when asked to identify themselves as either a smoker or a nonsmoker was not always consistent with how they respond to a question about how often they smoked cigarettes. A phantom smoker is defined to be someone who self-identifies as a nonsmoker but who admits to smoking cigarettes when asked about frequency of smoking. This prompted researchers to wonder if asking college students to self-identify as being a smoker or nonsmoker might be resulting in an underestimate of the actual percentage of smokers. The researchers planned to use data from a sample of 899 students to estimate the percentage of college students who are phantom smokers.

Short answer

The percentage of 'phantom smokers' among the 899 sampled college students can be determined by analyzing the responses for self-identification and actual smoking behaviour, calculating the numerical discrepancy, and using this discrepancy to estimate the percentage of 'phantom smokers' among the total student populace.

Step-by-step solution

Understand the terminology

A 'phantom smoker' is an individual who self-identifies as a nonsmoker but nevertheless smokes occasionally. These individuals will not be counted as smokers when conducting surveys that rely on self-identification, skewing the data.

Formulate the problem

To ascertain the potential skewing of data due to 'phantom smokers', the task at hand is to estimate the percentage of 'phantom smokers' among the 899 sampled college students.

Conduct Data Analysis

The original data will likely be a categorical variable for 'smoker' or 'nonsmoker' as per self identification and a continuous variable for the number of cigarettes smoked. Analyze these variables to determine how many students self-identify as nonsmokers despite smoking (i.e., 'phantom smokers').

Calculate the percentage of phantom smokers

Divide the number of 'phantom smokers' by the total number of students surveyed (899 in this case) and then multiply by 100. The resulting number is the percentage of 'phantom smokers' in the student population.