From the course: Statistics Foundations 3: Using Data Sets
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Confidence intervals with unexpected outcomes
From the course: Statistics Foundations 3: Using Data Sets
Confidence intervals with unexpected outcomes
- Suppose before an election, a polling organization develops a 95% confidence interval. This 95% confidence interval reports that Candidate A will receive between 51% and 54% of the vote. Then election day comes around, and Candidate A loses. Candidate A would probably be furious. Before the election, they were very confident of a win, and now they realize that they actually lost. How could this have happened? Well, this is where it helps to be a well-rounded statistician. Beyond having a knowledge of the numbers and formulas, you need to understand the real-life environment that surrounds the poll. In this case, it would be helpful if we understood how political polls are taken and also the nature of the actual election. So what might go wrong during the actual poll? Some people that are polled want to throw off the poll, so they just may lie. Or perhaps they're too embarrassed to tell a pollster about their true…
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