Project 1. Design your own sample survey. Choose an issue of current interest to students at your school. Prepare a short (no more than five questions) questionnaire to determine opinions on this issue. Choose a sample of about 25 students, administer your questionnaire, and write a brief description of your findings. Also write a short discussion of your experiences in designing and carrying out the survey.

(Although 25 students are too few for you to be statistically confident of your results, this project centers on the practical work of a survey. You must first identify a population; if it is not possible to reach a wider student population, use students enrolled in this course. How did you choose your sample? Did the subjects find your questions clear? Did you write the questions so that it was easy to tabulate the responses? At the end, did you wish you had asked different questions?)

Project 2. Measuring. Is the right hand generally stronger than the left in right-handed people? You can crudely measure hand strength by placing a bathroom scale on a shelf with the end protruding, then squeezing the scale between the thumb and the four fingers. The reading of the scale shows the force exerted. Using several right-handed subjects, try to determine whether this method of measuring hand strength is reliable. Write an account of your findings. For example, did you find that subjects used different grips, so that careful instructions were needed to get a consistent way of measuring? Prepare written instructions for subjects.

Project 3. Experimenting. After you or other members of your team have refined the measurement of hand strength in the previous project, carry out the matched pairs experiment of Project 2 with at least 10 subjects. Write a report that describes the randomization, gives the data, reports the differences in strength (right hand minus left hand), and says whether your small experiment seems to show that the right hand is stronger, on the average.

Project 4. Describe a medical study. Go to the website of the Journal of the American Medical Association (http://jama.ama-assn.org). Unlike the New England Journal of Medicine (http://content.nejm.org), JAMA makes the full text of some articles freely available online. Select an article from the current issue or from a past issue that describes a study whose topic interests you. Write a newspaper article that summarizes the design and the findings of the study. (Be sure to include statistical aspects, such as observational study versus experiment and any randomization used. News accounts often neglect these facts.)

Project 5. Do you drive an SUV? Are staff at your college more or less likely than students to drive an SUV? Design and carry out a study to find out, and write a report describing your design and your findings. You must first be clear about what “SUV’’ means so that each car is clearly an SUV or not. Then you must locate a suitable sample of cars–perhaps from a student parking area and a staff parking area. If the areas are large, you will want to sample the cars rather than look at all of them. Consider using a systematic sample (Exercise 4.34, page 90).

Project 6. Data ethics. Locate a news discussion of an ethical issue that concerns statistical studies. Write your own brief summary of the debate and any conclusions you feel you can reach.

Here is an example of one way to approach this project. Testing new drugs on human subjects continues to be an ongoing concern in medical studies. How does one balance the need for knowledge with protecting subjects from possible harm? Searching the archives at the website of the New York Times (www.nytimes.com) for “experiments and ethics’’ (to use the New York Times search engine, you should enter “+experiments +ethics’’), one finds many articles, including a promising one in the issue of May 7, 2015. To read the article, you may be able to link to it directly online, but if not, you will have to either pay a fee or go to the library. You could also try searching the Web with Google. We entered “drugs and human guinea pigs’’ and found some possible leads.

Project 7. Measuring income. What is the “income’’ of a household? Household income may determine eligibility for government programs that assist “low-income’’ people. Income statistics also have political effects. Political conservatives often argue that government data overstate how many people are poor because the data include only money income, leaving out the value of food stamps and subsidized housing. Political liberals reply that the government should measure money income so it can see how many people need help.

You are on the staff of a member of Congress who is considering new welfare legislation. Write an exact definition of “income’’ for the purpose of determining which households are eligible for welfare. A short essay will be needed. Will you include nonmoney income such as the value of food stamps or subsidized housing? Will you allow deductions for the cost of child care needed to permit the parent to work? What about assets that are worth a lot but do not produce income, such as a house?