R Notes for Topic 17: Tests of Significant: Proportions

The book asks us to “Use technology to conduct the appropriate test of significance”. A simple approach is to use the Test of Significance Calculator applet.

Of course, it is also easy to do the computation in R, since you know the formula. First, you compute the z-score. We'll do so for the first sample size.

z = (.3 - .25)/sqrt(.25*(1-.25)/50)

Now, how do we find out the p-value? In this case, we want P(Z > z). We can look up the z-score in the normal distribution table with pnorm(z). Since that gives P(Z < z), we subtract it from 1.

p = 1 - pnorm(z)

Putting it all together for the next sample,

z = (.3 - .25)/sqrt(.25*(1-.25)/100)
p = 1 - pnorm(z)
z
p