Headache relief Doctors identify “chronic tension- type headaches” as headaches that occur almost daily for at least six months. Can antidepressant medications or stress management training reduce the number and severity of these headaches? Are both together more effective than either alone? Investigators compared four treatments: antidepressant alone, placebo alone, antidepressant plus stress management, and placebo plus stress management. The headache sufferers named in the following table have agreed to participate in the study.

(a) Outline the design of the experiment. What is this type of design called?

(b) Explain how you would randomly assign the subjects to the four treatment groups. Then carry out your random assignment.

Short Answer

Expert verified

(a) This design is called total randomized design.

(b) It is possible by way of slips of paper.

Step by step solution

01

Given Information

Here, we want to check the effectiveness of antidepressant, medications or stress management training in reducing chronic tension type headaches when used daily for six months.

The headache sufferers are:

02

To identify experimental design

The treatments are distributed by chance to all in total randomized system.

Description is

03

To explain how to randomly assign the subjects to the four treatment groups.

  • The subjects can be assigned randomly to four treatment classes.
  • To implement the concept, thirty six slips are created to execute the concept.
  • Shake it well and take out nine slips. Assign first treatment class to them.
  • Take out other nine slips and assign them second treatment class.
  • Repeat till for all four treatment classes.

Unlock Step-by-Step Solutions & Ace Your Exams!

  • Full Textbook Solutions

    Get detailed explanations and key concepts

  • Unlimited Al creation

    Al flashcards, explanations, exams and more...

  • Ads-free access

    To over 500 millions flashcards

  • Money-back guarantee

    We refund you if you fail your exam.

Over 30 million students worldwide already upgrade their learning with Vaia!

One App. One Place for Learning.

All the tools & learning materials you need for study success - in one app.

Get started for free

Most popular questions from this chapter

Does reducing screen brightness increase battery life in laptop computers? To find out, researchers obtained 30new laptops of the same brand. They chose 15of the computers at random and adjusted their screens to the brightest setting. The other 15laptop screens were left at the default setting—moderate brightness. Researchers then measured how long each machine’s battery lasted.

Was this an observational study or an experiment? Justify your answer.

Effects of class size Do smaller classes in elementary school really benefit students in areas such as scores on standardized tests, staying in school, and going on to college? We might do an observational study that compares students who happened to be in smaller and larger classes in their early school years. Identify a lurking variable that may lead to confounding with

the effects of small classes. Explain how confounding might occur.

Doctors and nurses Nurse-practitioners are nurses with advanced qualifications who often act much like primary-care physicians. Are they as effective as doctors at treating patients with chronic conditions? An experiment was conducted with 1316patients who had been diagnosed with asthma, diabetes, or high blood pressure. Within each condition, patients were randomly assigned to either a doctor or a nurse-practitioner. The response variables included measures of the patients’ health and of their satisfaction with their medical care after six months.

(a) Which are the blocks in this experiment: the different diagnoses (asthma, etc.) or the type of care (nurse or doctor)? Why?

(b) Explain why a randomized block design is preferable to a completely randomized design in this setting.

Do reducing diets work? Dr. Linda Stern and her colleagues recruited 132obese adults at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Pennsylvania. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to a low-carbohydrate diet and the other half were assigned to a low-fat diet. Researchers measured each participant’s change in weight and cholesterol level after six months and again after one year. Subjects in the low-carb diet group lost significantly more weight than subjects in the low-fat diet group during the first six months of the study. At the end of a year, however, the average weight loss for subjects in the two groups was not significantly different.

(a) Why did researchers randomly assign the subjects to the diet treatments?

(b) Explain to someone who knows little statistics what “lost significantly more weight” means.

(c) The subjects in the low-carb diet group lost an aver-age of 5.1kg in a year. The subjects in the low-fat diet group lost an average of 3.1kg. Explain how this infor-

mation could be consistent with the fact that weight loss in the two groups was not significantly different.

The manager of a sports arena wants to learn more about the financial status of the people who are attending an NBA basketball game. He would like to give a survey to a representative sample of the more than 20,000 fans in attendance. Ticket prices for the game vary a great deal: seats near the court cost over \(100 each, while seats in the top rows of the arena cost \)25 each. The arena is divided into 30 numbered sections, from 101 to 130 Each section has rows of seats labeled with letters from A (nearest the court) to ZZ (top row

of the arena).

See all solutions

Recommended explanations on Math Textbooks

View all explanations

What do you think about this solution?

We value your feedback to improve our textbook solutions.

Study anywhere. Anytime. Across all devices.

Sign-up for free