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Several online textbook retailers advertise that they have lower prices than on-campus bookstores. However, an important factor is whether the Internet retailers actually have the textbooks that students need in stock. Students need to be able to get textbooks promptly at the beginning of the college term. If the book is not available, then a student would not be able to get the textbook at all, or might get a delayed delivery if the book is back ordered.

A college newspaper reporter is investigating textbook availability at online retailers. He decides to investigate one textbook for each of the following seven subjects: calculus, biology, chemistry, physics, statistics, geology, and general engineering. He consults textbook industry sales data and selects the most popular nationally used textbook in each of these subjects. He visits websites for a random sample of major online textbook sellers and looks up each of these seven textbooks to see if they are available in stock for quick delivery through these retailers. Based on his investigation, he writes an article in which he draws conclusions about the overall availability of all college textbooks through online textbook retailers.

Write an analysis of his study that addresses the following issues: Is his sample representative of the population of all college textbooks? Explain why or why not. Describe some possible sources of bias in this study, and how it might affect the results of the study. Give some suggestions about what could be done to improve the study.

Step by step solution

01

Given information

Given the survey of the overall availability of all college textbooks through online textbook retailers.

02

Explanation

No, the sample is not representative of the population of all college textbooks. Only a few handfuls of books have been selected and researched upon.

The possible source of bias is that the researcher consults the textbook industry for the sales data, this leads to the inclusion of only those books that are available and somehow hides the fact that there may be some books that are in demand but due to unavailability, their sales do not appear in the data.

There is a way to reduce the bias of this sort, but consulting the students about which books do they prefer and are more popular among them. This will help us get a complete idea about the popular books and will cover all the range of books to provide a better sample as well.

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