Comparing Two Populations

 Data Collection and Analysis

This data set comes from an article in the Journal of Statistics Education ( "Datasets and Stories" article "Data Management, Exploratory Data Analysis, and Regression Analysis with 1969-2000 Major League Baseball Attendance" in the _Journal of Statistics Education_ (Cochran 2002, www.amstat.org/publications/jse/v10n2/datasets.cochran.html).)

However, you should access the data here: http://inspire.stat.ucla.edu/unit_12/mlbdata.txt
This is a tab-delimited file  so  you  can  type  url  within  or  download your harddrive  and  select import from fathom.

This file has several potential response variables. Your goal is to see how the American and National leagues compare on these variables. Some questions to consider:

a) What "research" question does a particular hypothesis test help answer?

b) Are the assumptions supported for a particular hypothesis test? Is a hypothesis test even needed? Does comparing means make sense?

c) Note that we have ALL data from 1969 to 2000. Is a statistical test meaningful in this context? To which population are we making inferences? What must we assume to make this test meaningful?