The article “Career Expert Provides DOs and DON’Ts for Job Seekers on Social Networking” ( CareerBuilder. com, August 19, 2009) included data from a survey of 2,667 hiring managers and human resource professionals. The article noted that many employers are using social networks to screen job applicants and that this practice is becoming more common. Of the 2,667 people who participated in the survey, 1,200 indicated that they use social networking sites (such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn) to research job applicants. For the purposes of this exercise, assume that the sample can be regarded as a random sample of hiring managers and human resource professionals.
a. Suppose you are interested in learning about the value of p, the proportion of all hiring managers and human resource managers who use social networking sites to research job applicants. This proportion can be estimated using the sample proportion, ˆ p. What is the value of ˆ p for this sample?
b. Based on what you know about the sampling distribution of ˆ p , is it reasonable to think that this estimate is within 0.02 of the actual value of the population proportion? Explain why or why not.