Question

Reproducing the results of statistically significant experiments is an important part of performing good science. A psychology experiment in 2008 showed that young adults demonstrated an increased preference for their parents after completing an exercise about death as compared to an exercise about dental pain. In the study, participants were asked to allocate phone minutes to talk to a parent after completing a randomly assigned activity about either death or dental pain. A significant result was found with a p-value of 0.03.

Another group of researchers replicated the experiment to see if the results could be reproduced. In this activity we will analyzed a simplified version of their data. Assume that our goal is to show that young adults want to spend more minutes talking with their parents when they are thinking about mortality as opposed to dental pain.

a. Use StatKey to calculate the p-value for this hypothesis test.
b. What is the generic conclusion for this test?
c. What is the conclusion in context?

Answer 1

Answer:

(a)- Let the time in minutes of the phone call on mortality to parents be Tm and time in minutes of the phone call on dental pain be Td.

Null hypothesis:

Tm = Td

Alternate hypothesis:

Tm > Td

t-stat = (diff in means - 0)/std devn of diff in means

= -1.26

p-value = 0.74

(b)- Generic conclusion is donot reject null hypothesis as the p-value is greater than 0.05.There is no

difference in the means between the 2 groups.

(c)- In the context of the problem, the conclusion is there is no difference in preference for mortality or dental pain related calls.

When the actual thing is people want to talk when thinking on mortality, but the predicted is there is no difference.

Then we are committing a type Il error (falsely retaining the null hypothesis). prediction is stating

that the null hypothesis is true (there is no difference) but indeed there is difference. This is false retention or false negative.

Step-by-step explanation: