Case 75 Church Attendance

Summary:

Our scatter plot's regression line equation was AVEATT=96.07 + 3.126MONTH. On average the attendance of people per week went up by 3.126, if you plug the 28 months that the data was collected over you get y=183.5 people/week by using the regression line equation. You can calculate the first week's attendance by taking the number of people when x = 0 (theoretically week 0) and adding 3.126 people (making x = 1), therefore the attendance for week 1 is 96.07 + 3.126 = 99.196 people. The percent increase of people/week is (183.5-99.196)/99.196=.85 or 85%. The 85% increase of people/week should be measured against the increase of money the church is asking for, which is ((40 hours x .20 dollars) - 30 hours)/30 hours=.60 or 60% increase in dollars. The percent increase of 85% of people/week taken from the regression line equation it looks like asking for only 60% more dollars a week is reasonable request from the church.

Opinion on Al's decision to use Average weekly attendance:

It would have been more useful to do a week-to-week analysis than the average weekly church attendance for each month. This way one could see how much various holidays and summer months truly change the church attendance. During the holidays and summer months there is a large variation in church attendance, above and below the trend line. If we looked at the weekly Church attendance it might turn out that every week follows the trend line, but those in the summer months and holiday weeks. However, we cannot make these assumptions without looking at a weekly analysis of the Church attendance. If all the weeks, but those in the summer months and holiday weeks followed the trend line the R Square value would increase from .76 and get closer to 1, then we could be extremely confident that we can predict the future growth of