Chapter 4
Does caffeine improve exam performance? Suppose all students in the 8:30 section of a course are given a "treatment" (two cups of coffee) and all students in the 9:30 section are not permitted to have any caffeine before a mid-term exam. Unfortunately, any systematic difference between the two sections on the exam might be due to the fact that the 8:30 and 9:30 classes have different instructors. This is an example of
Confounding
In order to assess the effects of exercise on reducing cholesterol, a researcher took a random sample of fifty people from a local gym who exercised regularly and another random sample of fifty people from the surrounding community who did not exercise regularly. They all reported to a clinic to have their cholesterol measured. The subjects were unaware of the purpose of the study, and the technician measuring the cholesterol was not aware of whether or not subjects exercised regularly. This is a(n)
Observational Study
A farmer wishes to determine which of two brands of baby pig pellets, Kent or Moormans, produces better weight gains. Two of his sows each give birth to litters of 10 pigs on the same day, so he decides to give the baby pigs in litter A only Kent pellets, while the pigs in litter B will get only Moormans pellets. After four weeks, the average weight gain for pigs in litter A is greater than the average weight gain for pigs in litter B. If the farmer had fed Kent pellets to an SRS of 5 pigs from litter A and an SRS of 5 pigs from litter B, with the remaining 10 pigs getting Moormans pellets, then he would have been using
a block design
A farmer wishes to determine which of two brands of baby pig pellets, Kent or Moormans, produces better weight gains. Two of his sows each give birth to litters of 10 pigs on the same day, so he decides to give the baby pigs in litter A only Kent pellets, while the pigs in litter B will get only Moormans pellets. After four weeks, the average weight gain for pigs in litter A is greater than the average weight gain for pigs in litter B. The farmer has conducted a(n)
experiment, but not a completely randomized experiment.
Does caffeine improve exam performance? Suppose all students in the 8:30 section of a course are given a "treatment" (two cups of coffee) and all students in the 9:30 section are not permitted to have any caffeine before a mid-term exam. Instead of giving all students in the 8:30 section two cups of coffee, students in the 8:30 section are randomly assigned to a treatment group (two cups of coffee. or a control group (two cups of decaffeinated coffee). The coffee is so bad that students cannot tell whether they are in the treatment or the control group. As it turns out, students in both groups do better on the exam than students in the 9:30 section, who weren't given anything. This could be the result of
the placebo effect