3.15 Canada’s national health care. The Ministry of Health in the Canadian province of Ontario wants to know whether the national health care system is achieving its goals in the province. Much information about health care comes from patient records, but that source doesn’t allow us to compare people who use health services with those who don’t. So the Ministry of Health conducted the Ontario Health Survey, which interviewed a random sample of 61,239 people who live in the province of Ontario.
(a) What is the population for this sample survey? What is the sample?
(b) The survey found that 76% of males and 86% of females in the sample had visited a general practitioner at least once in the past year. Do you think these estimates are close to the truth about the entire population? Why?