In: Statistics and Probability
You are interested in estimating the the mean age of the citizens living in your community. In order to do this, you plan on constructing a confidence interval; however, you are not sure how many citizens should be included in the sample. If you want your sample estimate to be within 4 years of the actual mean with a confidence level of 97%, how many citizens should be included in your sample? Assume that the standard deviation of the ages of all the citizens in this community is 25 years.
Sample Size: ______
A % CI for mean can be obtained using the formula:
where, is the margin of Error.
From the above formula, n can be computed as:
Given: and critical value for Z for can be obtained from standard normal table, looking for area :
We get Zcritical = 2.17
Substituting the values:
= 183.9414
We get, Sample size = 184