Students Estimates of Lecture Room Width

Description

Lecture room width estimated by students in two different units.

Usage

data("roomwidth")

Format

A data frame with 113 observations on the following 2 variables.

unit

a factor with levels feet and metres.

width

the estimated width of the lecture room.

Details

Shortly after metric units of length were officially introduced in Australia, each of a group of 44 students was asked to guess, to the nearest metre, the width of the lecture hall in which they were sitting. Another group of 69 students in the same room was asked to guess the width in feet, to the nearest foot. The data were collected by Professor T. Lewis and are taken from Hand et al (1994). The main question is whether estimation in feet and in metres gives different results.

Source

D. J. Hand, F. Daly, A. D. Lunn, K. J. McConway and E. Ostrowski (1994). A Handbook of Small Datasets, Chapman and Hall/CRC, London.

Examples

  data("roomwidth", package = "HSAUR")
  convert <- ifelse(roomwidth$unit == "feet", 1, 3.28)
  boxplot(I(width * convert) ~ unit, data = roomwidth)