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Chapter 4: Designing Studies
Section 4.2
Experiments
The Practice of Statistics, 4th edition – For AP*
STARNES, YATES, MOORE
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Chapter 4
Designing Studies
 4.1
Samples and Surveys
 4.2
Experiments
 4.3
Using Studies Wisely
+ Section 4.2
Experiments
Learning Objectives
After this section, you should be able to…

DISTINGUISH observational studies from experiments
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DESCRIBE the language of experiments
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APPLY the three principles of experimental design

DESIGN comparative experiments utilizing completely randomized
designs and randomized block designs, including matched pairs
design
Study versus Experiment
Definition:
Experiments
In contrast to observational studies, experiments don’t just
observe individuals or ask them questions. They actively
impose some treatment in order to measure the response.
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 Observational
An observational study observes individuals and measures
variables of interest but does not attempt to influence the
responses.
An experiment deliberately imposes some treatment on
individuals to measure their responses.
When our goal is to understand cause and effect, experiments are the
only source of fully convincing data.
The distinction between observational study and experiment is one of
the most important in statistics.
Soy Good For You?
 Does
Taking Hormones Reduce Heart Attack Risk
After Menopause?
 The
Miracle of Vitamin D – Sound Science or Hype?
 Texting
 Owning
While Driving
More Cars Leads to a Longer Life
Experiments
 Is
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 Examples
Study versus Experiment
Definition:
A lurking variable is a variable that is not among the
explanatory or response variables in a study but that may
influence the response variable.
Confounding occurs when two variables are associated in
such a way that their effects on a response variable cannot be
distinguished from each other.
Well-designed experiments take steps to avoid confounding.
Experiments
Observational studies of the effect of one variable on another
often fail because of confounding between the explanatory
variable and one or more lurking variables.
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 Observational
Language of Experiments
Definition:
A specific condition applied to the individuals in an experiment is
called a treatment. If an experiment has several explanatory
variables, a treatment is a combination of specific values of these
variables.
The experimental units are the smallest collection of individuals
to which treatments are applied. When the units are human
beings, they often are called subjects.
Sometimes, the explanatory variables in an experiment are called factors.
Many experiments study the joint effects of several factors. In such an
experiment, each treatment is formed by combining a specific value (often
called a level) of each of the factors.
Experiments
An experiment is a statistical study in which we actually do
something (a treatment) to people, animals, or objects (the
experimental units) to observe the response. Here is the
basic vocabulary of experiments.
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 The

Louse-y Situation
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine
(March 11, 2010) compared two medicines to treat head lice:
an oral medication called ivermectin a topical lotion containing
malathion. Researchers studied 812 people in 376
households in seven areas around the world. Of the 185
randomly assigned to ivermectin, 171 were free from head lice
after two weeks compared to only 151 of the 191 households
randomly assigned to malathion.
Experiment
A
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Alternate Example
Problem: Identify the experimental units, explanatory and response variables,
and the treatments in this experiment.
Solution: The experimental units are the households, not the individual people,
since the treatments were assigned to entire households, not separately to
individuals within the household. The explanatory variable is type of medication
and the response variable is whether the household was lice-free. The
treatments were ivermectin and malathion.

Tomatoes
Does adding fertilizer affect the productivity of tomato plants?
How about the amount of water given to the plants? To
answer these questions, a gardener plants 24 similar tomato
plants in identical pots in his greenhouse. He will add fertilizer
to the soil in half of the pots. Also, he will water 8 of the plants
with 0.5 gallons of water per day, 8 of the plants with 1 gallon
of water per day and the remaining 8 plants with 1.5 gallons of
water per day. At the end of three months he will record the
total weight of tomatoes produced on each plant.
Experiment
 Growing
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Alternate Example
Problem: Identify the explanatory and response variables, experimental units,
and list all the treatments.
Solution: The two explanatory variables are fertilizer and water. The response
variable is the weight of tomatoes produced. The experimental units are the
tomato plants. There are 6 treatments:
(1) fertilizer, 0.5 gallon
(2) fertilizer, 1 gallon
(3) fertilizer, 1.5 gallons
(4) no fertilizer, 0.5 gallons
(5) no fertilizer, 1 gallon
(6) no fertilizer, 1.5 gallons
Experiments are the preferred method for examining the effect
of one variable on another. By imposing the specific treatment
of interest and controlling other influences, we can pin down
cause and effect. Good designs are essential for effective
experiments, just as they are for sampling.
Experiment

to Experiment Badly
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 How
Example, page 236
A high school regularly offers a review course to
prepare students for the SAT. This year, budget cuts
will allow the school to offer only an online version of
the course. Over the past 10 years, the average SAT
score of students in the classroom course was 1620.
The online group gets an average score of 1780.
That’s roughly 10% higher than the long- time
average for those who took the classroom review
course. Is the online course more effective?
Students -> Online Course -> SAT Scores

Caffeine Affect Pulse Rate
Many students regularly consume caffeine to help them stay
alert. Thus, it seems plausible that taking caffeine might
increase an individual’s pulse rate. Is this true? One way to
investigate this is to have volunteers measure their pulse
rates, drink some cola with caffeine, measure their pulses
again after 10 minutes and calculate the increase in pulse rate.
Unfortunately, even if every student’s pulse rate went
up, we couldn’t attribute the increase to caffeine.
Perhaps the excitement of being in an experiment made
their pulse rates increase. Perhaps it was the sugar in
the cola and not the caffeine. Perhaps their teacher told
them a funny joke during the 10 minute waiting period
and made everyone laugh! In other words, there are
many variables that are potentially confounded with
caffeine.
Experiment
 Does
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Alternate Example
Many laboratory experiments use a design like the one in the
online SAT course example:
Experimental
Units
Treatment
Measure
Response
In the lab environment, simple designs often work well.
Field experiments and experiments with animals or people deal
with more variable conditions.
Outside the lab, badly designed experiments often yield
worthless results because of confounding.
Experiment

to Experiment Badly
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 How

The remedy for confounding is to perform a comparative
experiment in which some units receive one treatment and
similar units receive another. Most well designed experiments
compare two or more treatments.
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Comparison alone isn’t enough, if the treatments are given to
groups that differ greatly, bias will result. The solution to the
problem of bias is random assignment.
Definition:
In an experiment, random assignment means that
experimental units are assigned to treatments at
random, that is, using some sort of chance process.
Experiments
to Experiment Well: The Randomized
Comparative Experiment
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 How
 More
Caffeine

Suppose you have a class of 30 students who
volunteer to be subjects in the caffeine
experiment described earlier.

Problem: Explain how you would randomly
assign 15 students to each of the two treatments.
Solution: Using 30 identical slips of paper, write A on 15 and B
on the other 15. Mix them thoroughly in a hat and have each
student select one paper. Have each student who received an A
drink the cola with caffeine and each student who received a B
to drink the cola without caffeine.
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Experiment
Alternate Example
Randomized Comparative Experiment
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 The
Group 1
Experimental
Units
Experiments
Definition:
In a completely randomized design, the treatments are
assigned to all the experimental units completely by chance.
Some experiments may include a control group that receives
an inactive treatment or an existing baseline treatment.
Treatment
1
Compare
Results
Random
Assignment
Group 2
Treatment
2
Diets

A health organization wants to know if a low-carb or low-fat diet is
more effective for long-term weight loss. The organization decides
to conduct an experiment to compare these two diet plans with a
control group that is only provided with brochure about healthy
eating. Ninety volunteers agree to participate in the study for one
year.

Problem: Outline a completely randomized design for this
experiment. Write a few sentences describing how you would
implement your design.
Group 1
30 Subjects
90 Volunteers
Random
Assignment
Group 2
30 Subjects
Group 3
30 Subjects
Experiment
 Dueling
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Alternate Example
Treatment 1
Low Carb
Treatment 2
Low Fat
Treatment 3
Control
Compare
Weight
Loss
Randomized comparative experiments are designed to give
good evidence that differences in the treatments actually
cause the differences we see in the response.
Principles of Experimental Design
1. Control for lurking variables that might affect the response: Use a
comparative design and ensure that the only systematic difference
between the groups is the treatment administered.
2. Random assignment: Use impersonal chance to assign experimental
units to treatments. This helps create roughly equivalent groups of
experimental units by balancing the effects of lurking variables that aren’t
controlled on the treatment groups.
3. Replication: Use enough experimental units in each group so that any
differences in the effects of the treatments can be distinguished from
chance differences between the groups.
Experiments

Principles of Experimental Design
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 Three
More Caffeine
Experiment
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Alternate Example
Problem: Explain how to use all three principles of
experimental design in the caffeine experiment.
Solution:
Control: There should be a control group that receives non-caffeinated cola.
Also, the subjects in each group should receive exactly the same amount of
cola served at the same temperature. Also, each type of cola should look
and taste exactly the same and have the same amount of sugar. Subjects
should drink the cola at the same rate and wait the same amount of time
before measuring their pulse rates. Try to control lurking variables.
Randomization: Subjects should be randomly assigned to one of the two
treatments. This should roughly balance out the effects of the lurking
variables we cannot control, such as body size, caffeine tolerance, and the
amount of food recently eaten.
Replication: We want to use as many subjects as possible to help make the
treatment groups as equivalent as possible. This will give us a better
chance to see the effects of caffeine, if there are any.
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Read the description of the Physicians’ Health Study on page
241. Explain how each of the three principles of experimental
design was used in the study.
A placebo is a “dummy pill” or inactive
treatment that is indistinguishable from the real
treatment.
Experiments
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The Physicians’ Health Study
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 Example:
What Can Go Wrong?
The logic of a randomized comparative experiment depends
on our ability to treat all the subjects the same in every way
except for the actual treatments being compared.
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Good experiments, therefore, require careful attention to
details to ensure that all subjects really are treated identically.
A response to a dummy treatment is called a placebo effect. The
strength of the placebo effect is a strong argument for randomized
comparative experiments.
Whenever possible, experiments with human subjects should be
double-blind.
Definition:
In a double-blind experiment, neither the subjects nor those
who interact with them and measure the response variable
know which treatment a subject received.
Experiments
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 Experiments:
for Experiments
In an experiment, researchers usually hope to see a difference
in the responses so large that it is unlikely to happen just
because of chance variation.
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We can use the laws of probability, which describe chance
behavior, to learn whether the treatment effects are larger than
we would expect to see if only chance were operating.
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If they are, we call them statistically significant.
Definition:
An observed effect so large that it would rarely occur by chance is
called statistically significant.
A statistically significant association in data from a well-designed
experiment does imply causation.
Experiments
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 Inference
Distracted Drivers
Perform 10 repetitions of your simulation and report the number of drivers in the cell
phone group who failed to stop
Experiments
Is talking on a cell phone while driving more distracting than talking to a passenger?
Read the Activity on page 245.
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 Activity:
Teacher: Right-click (control-click) on the graph to edit the counts.
In what percent of the class’ trials did 12 or more people in the cell phone group fail to stop?
Based on these results, how surprising would it be to get a result this large or larger simply
due to chance involved in random assignment? Is this result statistically significant?
Completely randomized designs are the simplest statistical designs
for experiments. But just as with sampling, there are times when the
simplest method doesn’t yield the most precise results.
Definition
A block is a group of experimental units that are known before
the experiment to be similar in some way that is expected to
affect the response to the treatments.
Experiments
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 Blocking
In a randomized block design, the random assignment of
experimental units to treatments is carried out separately within
each block.
Form blocks based on the most important unavoidable sources of variability
(lurking variables) among the experimental units.
Randomization will average out the effects of the remaining lurking variables
and allow an unbiased comparison of the treatments.
Control what you can, block on what you can’t control, and randomize
to create comparable groups.
 A cell
Texting?
phone company is considering two different
keyboard designs (A and B) for its new line of cell
phones. Researchers would like to conduct an
experiment using subjects who are frequent texters and
subjects who are not frequent texters. The subjects will
be asked to text several different messages in 5
minutes. The response variable will be the number of
correctly typed words.
Experiment
 Better
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Alternate Example
Problem:
(a) Explain why a randomized block design might be preferable to a
completely randomized design for this experiment.
(b) Outline a randomized block experiment using 100 frequent texters and
200 novice testers.
A common type of randomized block design for comparing two
treatments is a matched pairs design. The idea is to create blocks by
matching pairs of similar experimental units.
Definition
A matched-pairs design is a randomized blocked experiment
in which each block consists of a matching pair of similar
experimental units.
Chance is used to determine which unit in each pair gets each
treatment.
Sometimes, a “pair” in a matched-pairs design consists of a
single unit that receives both treatments. Since the order of the
treatments can influence the response, chance is used to
determine with treatment is applied first for each unit.
Experiments

Design
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 Matched-Pairs
Consider the Fathom dotplots from a completely randomized
design and a matched-pairs design. What do the dotplots
suggest about standing vs. sitting pulse rates?
Experiments

Standing and Sitting Pulse Rate
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 Example:
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Section 4.2
Experiments
Summary
In this section, we learned that…
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We can produce data intended to answer specific questions by
observational studies or experiments.

In an experiment, we impose one or more treatments on a group of
experimental units (sometimes called subjects if they are human).

The design of an experiment describes the choice of treatments and the
manner in which the subjects are assigned to the treatments.

The basic principles of experimental design are control for lurking
variables, random assignment of treatments, and replication (using
enough experimental units).

Many behavioral and medical experiments are double-blind.
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Section 4.2
Experiments
Summary, con’t
In this section, we learned that…
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Some experiments give a placebo (fake treatment) to a control
group that helps confounding due to the placebo-effect.

In addition to comparison, a second form of control is to form blocks
of individuals that are similar in some way that is important to the
response. Randomization is carried out within each block.

Matched pairs are a common form of blocking for comparing just
two treatments. In some matched pairs designs, each subject
receives both treatments in a random order.
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Looking Ahead…
In the next Section…
We’ll learn how to use studies wisely.
We’ll learn about
 The Scope of Inference
 The Challenges of Establishing Causation
 Data Ethics