Fix It Joey Is a Sommelier Who Wants to Develop a Survey

question 32

Essay

Fix It
Joey is a sommelier who wants to develop a survey to assess how much his customers know about wine. He writes as many questions about wine he can think of and eventually ends up with 100 items. Joey names the scale the Wine Connoisseur Survey (WCS) and begins to administer it to his customers. Scores on the WCS range from 0 (not knowledgeable) to 100 (extremely knowledgeable). His goal is to identify those customers who are not very knowledgeable about wine so he may get them to enroll in his wine class. Joey decides that he'll ask anyone who scores 50 or less on the scale to take his wine class. To his surprise, very few people score poorly on the WCS. In fact, most people score close to 100. Joey is thrilled to find that so many people are so knowledgeable about wine!
Joey's wife, Ava, is a Master's degree student who decides to use Joey's survey in her thesis project. She predicts that people who know more about wine will spend more money on a bottle of wine than people who know relatively little about wine. To that end, she asks patrons of Joey's store to complete the WCS and then measures how much money they spend on a bottle of wine. She finds that people who score a 50 or less on the WCS spend $8 on average on a bottle of wine. In contrast, those who score greater than 50 on the WCS spend $10 on average on a bottle of wine. Based on these results Ava concludes that knowing more about wine leads them to spend more on a bottle. She reasons that people with knowledge are more appreciative of wine and therefore more willing to splurge on a good bottle. Joey presents Ava's results at the upcoming sommelier convention and uses it to promote the WCS.
What do you think about Joey's scale? What do you think about Ava's conclusions about how wine knowledge affects how much one spends on a bottle of wine?

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