Statistics Question: A pollster surveys 200 people and asks them their political preference?

Question

26. Interpreting Political Polling: A pollster surveys 200 people and asks them their preference of political party. He codes the responses as 0 (for Democrat), 1 (for Republican), 2 (for Independent), or 3 (for any other responses). He then calculates the average (mean) of the numbers and gets 0.95. How can that value be interpreted?

please help i don't have the book yet so i donno what kind of answer it wants

Answer 1

I don't think the average is very meaningful in this type of poll.  This average (.95) would indicate that most of the respondents were Republicans, but that is not necessarily the case.  A bunch of 0's and a few fewer 3's could get you a .95  For example, if you had 136 Democrats and 64 Others it would give you an average of .96 (close to that in the problem).  This appears to indicate a Republican bias, even though none of the respondents indicated that preference.

A statistic that would be more meaningful is a percentage of the whole for each responding group.  For example, if 50 people responded Democrat, 75 responded Republican, 10 responded Independent, and 65 responded Other, then you could say that 25% (50/200) were Democrats; 37.5% (75/200) were Republicans, 5% (10/200) were Independent, and 32.5% (65/200) were Other.  That kind of statistic is more meaningful.

The way the problem is written can really skew the data (and is one of the reasons that there is the expression, "There are liars, there are damned liars, and there are statisticians.")  Using the wrong statistical method is one way to sneakily skew data.  

Answer 2

It would seem that Democrats are in the majority in this sample.