Analysis
Let’s suppose that you work in the quality control department for the M&M’s/Mars Company. You have been tasked with reviewing product consistency regarding the packaging of plain M&M’s candy. Your job is to determine if the number of blue, green, brown, orange, and yellow M&M’s in each bag is relatively equal. Obviously, not every bag will contain the exact same number of M&M’s, divided into equal quantities. However, as part of your quality control responsibilities you want to determine if there is a significant difference in the number of colors in each bag. After all, you don’t want customers to open a bag and only receive primarily one or two colors. You could use a one variable chi-square test to analyze your research question: is the number of blue, green, brown, orange, and yellow M&M’s significantly different?
Your stated null and alternative hypotheses would look like this:
Ho: There is no significant difference between the number of blue, green, brown, orange, and yellow M&M’s per bag.
H1: There is a significant difference between the number of blue, green, brown, orange, and yellow M&M’s per bag.
Next, we would move through the steps required to complete the chi-square test.
1. How would you conduct this analysis? What are the steps that we must follow?