Question

The human resources department of a very large corporation (more than 20,000 employees)
suspects that people are more likely to call in sick on Monday or Friday, so they can take a long
weekend. They took a random sample of 720 sick-day reports from the past few years and
determined the day of the week for each report. The results are below.

day	monday	tuesday	wednesday	thursday	friday
# of sick days	154	132	126	135	173

(a) Do the data provide convincing evidence that sick day calls are not evenly distributed through the
week? Justify your answer with appropriate statistical evidence. Use α = 0.05.

(b) Use components of the chi-square statistic to perform a follow-up analysis on whether the data
supports the claim that employees may be using sick days to take long weekends.

Answer 1