How do you find the 95% confidence interval?

Find the 95% confidence interval for a sample of size 39 with a mean of 20.3 and a standard deviation of 10.2.

1 Answer
Jan 28, 2017

A 95% confidence interval with the given data gives: (17.1, 23.5)

Explanation:

The confidence interval is given by the formula:

barx +-z(sigma/sqrtn)

Or you can write it as:

(barx -z(sigma/sqrtn),barx +z(sigma/sqrtn))

Where barx is the sample mean, z is the standardized value for the normal distribution, in relation to the percentage (don't really know how to explain this one that well), sigma is the standard deviation, and n is the sample size.

We know all the values except for z. To find the z value, we can imagine a normal distribution graph with 95% of it shaded, where the middle of this is the mean.

![https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1.96](useruploads.socratic.org)

As you can see from this picture the z value is 1.96. This can be found by using a normal distribution percentage points look up table.
I hope you can see that to the left and right of the shaded area, 2.5% is taken up by the white space each side.

So therefore you do 95%+2.5% = 97.5% then you can look that value up in the tables which is in fact: 1.96.

Now you can just substitute all the numbers into the expression:

(20.3 -1.96(10.2/sqrt39),20.3 +1.96(10.2/sqrt39))

Enter this into your calculator and you get:

(17.1, 23.5)

Hope this helps!