Congress voting on women’s issues. The American Economic Review (Mar. 2008) published research on how the gender mix of a U.S. legislator’s children can influence the legislator’s votes in Congress. Specifically, the researcher investigated how having daughters influences voting on women’s issues. The American Association of University Women (AAUW) uses voting records of each member of Congress to compute LO9 an AAUW score, where higher scores indicate more favorable voting for women’s rights. The researcher modeled AAUW score (y) as a function of the number of daughters (x) a legislator has. Data collected for the 434 members of the 107th Congress were used to fit the straight-line model, E1y2 = b0 + b1x.

a. If it is true that having daughters influences voting on women’s issues, will the sign of b1 be positive or negative?
Explain.

b. The following statistics were reported in the article:
b n 1 = .27 and sb n 1 = .74. Find a 95% confidence interval for b1.

c. Use the result, part

b, to make an inference about the model.