Robert notices that several respondents did not answer the question of whether they took out loans to fund their education.However,later in his survey,Robert finds that respondents told him about the source(s)and the amount(s)of their college loans.In handling the missing data on the question of whether or not they had a college loan,Robert's best approach is to:
A)randomly assign values to the missing data.
B)delete the cases with missing data from the analysis.
C)assign the middle value to the cases with the missing data.
D)use the latter information about amount and source of loans as grounds for assigning values to the cases which had missing values.
E)all of these choices are equally appropriate.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The best approach is to use the latter information about the amount and source of loans as grounds for assigning values to the cases which had missing values. This approach is known as imputation, and it involves using other related variables or information to predict what the missing values might have been. In this case, Robert can use the information about the amount and source of loans to make an educated guess about whether the respondent had a loan or not. Randomly assigning values or deleting cases can introduce bias or reduce the sample size, respectively, and assigning the middle value is not appropriate for categorical data. Therefore, option D is the best choice.

Robert Notices That Several Respondents Did Not Answer the Question