This week you will begin working on Phase 3 of your course project. Using the same data set and variables for your selected topic that you used for phases 1 and 2, add the following information to your analysis:

1. 1. Discuss the process for hypothesis testing.
      1. Explain the 8 steps of hypothesis testing
      2. When performing the 8 steps for hypothesis testing, which method do you prefer; P-Value method or Critical Value method? Why?

1. Perform the hypothesis test.

   If you selected Option 2 (Patients at NLEX hospital):

   Claim: The average age of all patients admitted to the hospital with infectious diseases is less than 65 years of age. Test the claim using ? = 0.05 and assume your data is normally distributed and ? is unknown.

   Based on your selected topic, perform and document the following steps:

   1. Write the null and alternative hypothesis symbolically and identify which hypothesis is the claim.
   2. Is the test two-tailed, left-tailed, or right-tailed? Explain.
   3. Which test statistic will you use for your hypothesis test; z-test or t-test? Explain.
   4. What is the value of the test-statistic? Show your calculation
   5. What is the P-value? Explain how you determined it
   6. What is the critical value? Explain how you calculated it
   7. What is your decision? Reject the null or do not reject the null? Explain why you made your decision including the results for your p-value and the critical value.
   8. State the final conclusion in non-technical terms.

Please show your work for the construction of the test-statistic and explain your process for finding the p-value and critical value. You may use the Equation Editor to format your calculation steps on the Word document or attach an Excel spreadsheet clearly showing each calculation for #B4 and #B5, but your answers still need to appear on the Word document. Also, be sure to number each response in your paper using the same numbers as above