The employee benefits manager of a small private university would like to know the proportion of its full-time employees who prefer adopting each of three available health care plans in the forthcoming annual enrollment period. A reliable frame of the university’s employees and their tentative health care preferences are given in P8_25.XLS.

a. Compute the proportion of the employees in the given frame who favor each of the three plans (i.e., plans A, B, and C).

b. Use Excel to choose a simple random sample of size 45 from the given frame.

c. Compute the proportion of the 45 employees in the random sample who favor each health plan. Compare these sample proportions to the corresponding values obtained in part a. Explain any differences between the corresponding values.

d. What are the advantages and disadvantages of employing simple random sampling in this particular case?