Example
50 smokers were questioned about the number of hours they sleep each day. We want to test the hypothesis that the smokers need less sleep than the general public which needs an average of 7.7 hours of sleep. We follow the steps below.
Compute a rejection region for a significance level of .05.
If the sample mean is 7.5 and the population standard deviation is 0.5, what can you conclude?
Solution
First, we write write down the null and alternative hypotheses
H0: m = 7.7 H1: m < 7.7
This is a left tailed test. The z-score that corresponds to .05 is -1.645. The critical region is the area that lies to the left of -1.645. If the z-value is less than -1.645 there we will reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hypothesis. If it is greater than -1.645, we will fail to reject the null hypothesis and say that the test was not statistically significant.
We have
Since -2.83 is to the left of -1.645, it is in the critical region. Hence we reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hypothesis. We can conclude that smokers need less sleep.