Sample Size

determination
By
Prof. Prasad Kulkarni
Population
A population is a collection of
people, items, or events about
which you want to make
inferences.It is not always
convenient or possible to
examine every member of an
entire population.
Sample
A sample is a subset of people,
items, or events from a larger
population that you collect and
analyze to make inferences. To
represent the population well, a
sample should be randomly
collected and adequately large.
Confidence interval
A confidence interval is a range
of values, derived from sample
statistics, that is likely to
contain the value of an unknown
population parameter.
Confidence level
The confidence level indicates how
likely it is that the population
parameter, such as the mean, is
contained in the confidence interval.
A confidence level of 95% usually
works well. This indicates that 19 out
of 20 samples (95%) from the same
population will produce confidence
intervals that contain the population
parameter
Proportion
A proportion is a relative portion of a whole, as opposed
to a count or frequency. For example, suppose your
company manufactures a silver alloy for photographic
film. If you were interested in the proportion of silver (by
weight) in the mixture, you aren't worried about how
many pounds of silver your plant uses in a day, you're
worried about the portion of silver relative to the entire
alloy. Assuming that precisely half of the alloy is silver,
the proportion of silver could be expressed as a
percentage (50%), a decimal (0.5), or a fraction (1/2).
Proportions let you compare groups of unequal size. For
example, a call center that handles 10,000 calls a day
might record many more dropped calls than a facility that
handles only 500 calls, but they may both have the same
proportion of dropped calls.
formulas

Margin of error = e | z-score = z

p= proportion
e is percentage, put into decimal
form (for example, 3% = 0.03).
The Northern Lights Company is a retail catalog operation
specializing in outdoor clothing. The company has a pool of 28
telephone operators to take catalog orders during the business
hours of 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. (The company uses a smaller
pool of operators for the remaining 16 off-peak hours.) The
company has recently been experiencing a larger number of
lost calls because operators are busy and suspects it is because
the operators are spending around 30 percent of their time
describing products to customers. The company believes that if
operators knew more about the products instead of having to
pull up a description screen on the computer each time a
customer asked a question about a product, they could save a
lot of operator time, so it is thinking about instituting a product
awareness training program. However, first the company wants
to perform a work sampling study to determine the proportion
of time operators are answering product-related questions. The
company wants the proportion of this activity to be accurate
within 2 percent, with a 95 percent degree of confidence.

SOLUTION:

First determine the number of observations to take, as follows:

Population Size = N | Margin of
error = e | z-score = z p=
proportion
e is percentage, put into decimal
form (for example, 3% = 0.03).