Hunter Lacamu

Austin High Transportation to School Confidence Intervals

AP Statistics
6th period
2/11/15

To create confidence intervals for something that pertained to me personally and interested me, I chose to find confidence intervals for the proportion of people that (like me) are driven to school. Transportation is a common concern in everyones daily life. My purpose in finding
these confidence intervals is to compare the luxury I have of getting dropped off at school to
how others arrive.
My population consisted of the entire student body at Austin High School, and my sample was made up of 30 randomly selected students. My sample may have been subject to underrepresentation because there were many instances in my random sample where people
were grouped together and I had to choose more than one from a group. Choosing students
without bias is achievable through the placement of myself and the time that I survey students
because they are constantly on the move.
To gather my data I surveyed random students that I encountered on all floors in the
morning, at lunch, and after school. The time of day mattered greatly because certain students
are more active during certain parts of the day, and many students stick to familiar parts of the
school to hang around, so I was very diverse with the locations that I surveyed students. I gathered signatures from each individual and approached everyone in the same manner (I also
made sure each individual was okay with being part of a sample in a courteous manner). Since
the survey consisted of categorical data, my confidence intervals were proportion intervals.
9 of the 30 students I sampled are driven, and with my limited sample size my intervals
were rather large. Not all of my conditions were adequate (my sample multiplied by p hat was
too low), but I continued with a normal approximation to determine my confidence intervals. With
the data I gathered I am 90% confident that true proportion of Austin High students who are
driven to school is between 16.238% and 43.762%. I am 95% confident that the true proportion
of Austin High students that are driven to school is between 13.602% and 46.398%. I am 98%
confident that the true population proportion of Austin High students who are driven to school is

between 10.536% and 49.464%. These intervals indicate that it is extremely likely that less
than half of the student body at Austin High is given a ride to school.
My intervals provided a lot of width because I had such a small sample size, which if I
were to do this survey again I would get a larger sample size to better trust my data. From what
I gathered there is a strong number of Austin High students that are driven to school on a daily
basis, though not as much as I initially thought. I assumed that most individuals would be
dropped off, but the data I have suggests the bus is the main form of transportation for Austin
High students. That being said, my data cannot be fully trusted because not all the conditions
for my confidence intervals were met. Of what I have learned from surveying these students, the
most important would be that a minimal sample size may not always be good enough, there
should be a large enough sample size to thoroughly meet all the conditions in creating confidence intervals.

Appendix A

Appendix B