A compensation specialist at a technology company wants to assess the competitiveness of the salaries at his firm. He needs to know the mean salary of the firm's employees. He checks all the employee salaries using company records, and he used his computer to create a 95% confidence interval based on a t-distribution. This procedure was not appropriate. Why?
A) Since these employees are from only one firm, the salaries may be skewed.
B) The entire population of employees was gathered so there is no reason to do inference.
C) At a given firm, employees are not randomly selected.
D) The CEO's salary is probably an outlier.
E) The population standard deviation is known, so he should have used a z-model.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Since the compensation specialist has access to and uses the entire population of the company's employees' salaries, there is no need to estimate parameters like the mean salary through inference methods such as confidence intervals. Inference, including the use of t-distributions for confidence intervals, is appropriate when dealing with samples from which to infer about a population, not when the entire population data is available.

A Compensation Specialist at a Technology Company Wants to Assess