# the meaning of confidence interval in real life examples

A post explains "Confidence Intervals" in several real life examples. I guess I partly understand the main idea in it and have some

I guess I clearly understand the example of the U.S. Census Bureau in that post, which routinely uses confidence levels of 90% in their surveys.

"the number of people in poverty in the United States is 35,534,124 to 37,315,094" means (35,534,124 to 37,315,094) is the confidence interval.

Assume the Bureau repeats the survey 1,000 times, the confidence levels of 90% means that the stated number is between (35,534,124 to 37,315,094) at least 900 times. Maybe 36,000,000 is people in poverty, maybe less a bit, maybe greater a bit, any number in the interval is as expected.

So far so good.

I don't really understand the part in the example of "2008 Gallup survey"

For the European data, one can say with 95% confidence that the true population for wellbeing among those without TVs is between 4.88 and 5.26.

It does not make sense to say there 4.88 people don't have TV in their home.

what does the confidence interval “between 4.88 and 5.26“ mean there?

I had to go read the original Gallup survey results. There it is indicated that respondents were asked to indicate their own well being on a scale from 0 to 10, where 10 represents "the best possible life for you" and 0 the worst. So $$[4.88, 5.26]$$ is the 95% confidence interval around the score reported by people without the TV.