Question

Suppose you are interested in finding out if Cal Poly students can accurately tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Explain how you would get your sample and how you would set up your experiment. As a side note, if you were interested in which students prefer in order to install a new soda machine, would you rather base your decision a poll of student’s favorites or on a blind taste test?       

Answer 1

We will follow the steps to set up the experiment -

1) Select random sample out of the students.

2) As all the students the same construct of question to know if they like Coke or Pepsi.

3) Compare the proportion of students who like Coke or Pepse

4) Whichever out of these would be more than 50% will chose to install that on a new soda machine.

It will always be better to trust the poll results as it will indicate the preference of the users and would be better than random deciding what students would like.