Dr Tropez Conducts a Study Examining the Relationship Between Exposure

question 50

Essay

Dr. Tropez conducts a study examining the relationship between exposure to religion in popular media and religiosity (defined as "the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods"). In his study, he randomly samples a group of 113 participants from his local community college. He generates a list of movies with religious themes (Year One, Dogma, Passion of the Christ) and asks participants to indicate how many they have seen. He then measures religiosity by asking participants how many times they have attended a house of worship (e.g., church, temple, synagogue, mosque) in the past year. He finds that having seen a higher number of religious-themed films is positively correlated with religious attendance.
A colleague criticizes Dr. Tropez for using a WEIRD sample. Explain what this means and why it is a problem.

Calculate failure rate, mean time between failures (MTBF), and interpret their significance in reliability engineering.

Understand the impact of redundancy at system or component level to improve reliability.

Analyze real-life scenarios to assess cost-effective maintenance strategies and decision-making in system design and maintenance.

Apply concepts of reliability engineering to practical problems relating to product and system designs.