Problem in Statistics…?
During the 1980s approximately 22,000 physicians over the age of 40 agreed to participate in a long-term study called the Physicians’ Health Study. One question investigated was whether aspirin helps to lower the rate of heart attacks. The physicians were randomly assigned to take aspirin or take placebo.
a. Identify the response variable and the explanatory variable.
b. Explain why this is an experiment, and identify the treatments.
c. There are other explanatory variables, such as the amount of exercise a physician got, that we would expect to be associated the response variable. Explain how such a variable is dealt with by the randomized nature of the experiment.
response variable is heart attacks and the explanatory variable is aspirin.
this is an experiment because there is a treatment and control group and was set up. observation would be studying data that was already available that required no set up by the researcher.
other explanatory variables would be age, genetics, family history, smoking, drug use, drinking. most of these variables are accounted for because there are enough physicians to have, on average, at least one in both the control and treatment with the same covariates. it would be best however to track the covariates and use a multiple regression analysis method to determine the affect of aspirin in this experiment.
Intention & Retrocausality – York Dobyns (1 of 3)
