Question: College dining. University and college food service operations have been trying to keep up with the growing expectations of consumers with regard to the overall campus dining experience. Since customer satisfaction has been shown to be associated with repeat patronage and new customers through word-of-mouth, a public university in the Midwest took a sample of patrons from their eating establishments and asked them about their overall dining satisfaction. The following table summarizes the results for three groups of patrons:
(a) Is it reasonable to use a pooled standard deviation for these data? Why or why not? If yes, compute it.
(b) The ANOVA F statistic was reported as 17.66. Give the degrees of freedom and either an approximate (from a table) or an exact (from software) P-value. Sketch a picture of the F distribution that illustrates the P-value. What do you conclude?
(c) Prior to performing this survey, food service operations thought that satisfaction among faculty would be higher than satisfaction among students. Use the results in the table to test this contrast. Make sure to specify the null and alternative hypotheses, test statistic, and P-value.