Answer to Question #41690 in Statistics and Probability for Claire

Question

Prof. Coffey is studying a population of the elementary school pupils in a school district with data on all its children. Dr. Meyer suggests she calculate a confidence interval to estimate the mean age of these children. Prof. Coffey responds that it is not necessary. Explain why Prof. Coffey is correct.

Answer 1

To construct a confidence interval, she calculates the mean and other values which affect the limits of confidence interval. Thus, to estimate the mean, she just calculates the mean age as the sum of all ages divided by the number of children. So, it is not necessary to construct a confidence interval.