U.S. Tax Code probability homework

[g3lo]

Hello All,

I am new to these forums and hope someone may help me out. I am doing an assignment and am stuck on one of the questions.

There is a sample of 1000 people of different age groups.
18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65 or older

People were asked if they thought the new tax code is fair or unfair. I have an excel document with all the data.

The question asks, what is the probability that the people felt that the U.S. Tax Code is unfairly spread across income groups and education levels.

I do not want the answer, rather how I can approach to obtain the answer myself. Your help is greatly appreciated in advance.

How would I tackle the problem?
--G3LO
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[chiro]

Hello All,

I am new to these forums and hope someone may help me out. I am doing an assignment and am stuck on one of the questions.

There is a sample of 1000 people of different age groups.
18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65 or older

People were asked if they thought the new tax code is fair or unfair. I have an excel document with all the data.

The question asks, what is the probability that the people felt that the U.S. Tax Code is unfairly spread across income groups and education levels.

I do not want the answer, rather how I can approach to obtain the answer myself. Your help is greatly appreciated in advance.

How would I tackle the problem?
--G3LO
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Hey there and welcome to the forums.

For something like what you are looking for, have a look into experimental design.

To eliminate the kinds of bias you are talking about, it would be expected that the experiment where as random and as unbiased as possible.

Are you or have you done a major in statistics?

 

[g3lo]

No I have not.

This is the data.
Age Totals
Response18-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65 or older
Fair 68 165 208 153 68 36 698
Unfair 42 96 79 51 20 14 302
Totals 110 261 287 204 88 50 1000

Would it be correct, if the question is asking, for each age group, what is the probability that the result is unfair.

I would do 42/1000, 96/1000, 79/1000, etc.

Is that correct?

 

[chiro]

Actually I just want to apologize since I thought you were asking about finding a "fair" experiment. For some reason I tied the word "fair" and "unfair" to the experiment so disregard the above comment.

As for getting probability for age group you will probably be interested in conditional probability. So say P(Unfair | Age = 18-24) = P(Unfair AND 18-24)/P(Age = 18-24).

Does this sound right?