Smoking habits of UK residents. (1.10, p. 20) A survey was conducted to study the smoking habits of UK residents. Below is a data matrix displaying a portion of the data collected in this survey. Note that “\(\pounds\)” stands for British Pounds Sterling, “cig” stands for cigarettes, and “N/A” refers to a missing component of the data.

  1. What does each row of the data matrix represent?
  2. How many participants were included in the survey?
  3. Indicate whether each variable in the study is numerical or categorical. If numerical, identify as continuous or discrete. If categorical, indicate if the variable is ordinal.
## -- Attaching packages --------------------------------------- tidyverse 1.3.0 --
## v ggplot2 3.3.3     v purrr   0.3.4
## v tibble  3.0.6     v dplyr   1.0.3
## v tidyr   1.1.2     v stringr 1.4.0
## v readr   1.4.0     v forcats 0.5.1
## -- Conflicts ------------------------------------------ tidyverse_conflicts() --
## x dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## x dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
head(smoking)
## # A tibble: 6 x 12
##   Sex     Age `Marital Status` `Highest Qualif~ Nationality Ethnicity
##   <chr> <dbl> <chr>            <chr>            <chr>       <chr>    
## 1 Male     38 Divorced         No Qualification British     White    
## 2 Fema~    42 Single           No Qualification British     White    
## 3 Male     40 Married          Degree           English     White    
## 4 Fema~    40 Married          Degree           English     White    
## 5 Fema~    39 Married          GCSE/O Level     British     White    
## 6 Fema~    37 Married          GCSE/O Level     British     White    
## # ... with 6 more variables: `Gross Income` <chr>, Region <chr>,
## #   `Smoke?` <chr>, `Amount Weekends` <chr>, `Amount Weekdays` <chr>,
## #   Type <chr>
summary(smoking)
##      Sex                 Age        Marital Status     Highest Qualification
##  Length:1693        Min.   :16.00   Length:1693        Length:1693          
##  Class :character   1st Qu.:34.00   Class :character   Class :character     
##  Mode  :character   Median :48.00   Mode  :character   Mode  :character     
##                     Mean   :49.82                                           
##                     3rd Qu.:65.00                                           
##                     Max.   :97.00                                           
##  Nationality         Ethnicity         Gross Income          Region         
##  Length:1693        Length:1693        Length:1693        Length:1693       
##  Class :character   Class :character   Class :character   Class :character  
##  Mode  :character   Mode  :character   Mode  :character   Mode  :character  
##                                                                             
##                                                                             
##                                                                             
##     Smoke?          Amount Weekends    Amount Weekdays        Type          
##  Length:1693        Length:1693        Length:1693        Length:1693       
##  Class :character   Class :character   Class :character   Class :character  
##  Mode  :character   Mode  :character   Mode  :character   Mode  :character  
##                                                                             
##                                                                             
## 
dim(smoking)
## [1] 1693   12
nrow(smoking)
## [1] 1693

Ans - a : Each row represent an observation

Ans - b : per book it appears to be 1691 observations and hence 1691 particpants. However when I downloaded the data from the source site mentioned in the book I found 1693 participants

names(smoking)
##  [1] "Sex"                   "Age"                   "Marital Status"       
##  [4] "Highest Qualification" "Nationality"           "Ethnicity"            
##  [7] "Gross Income"          "Region"                "Smoke?"               
## [10] "Amount Weekends"       "Amount Weekdays"       "Type"

Ans - c : Below are the variable categories and types:

Cheaters, scope of inference. (1.14, p. 29) Exercise 1.5 introduces a study where researchers studying the relationship between honesty, age, and self-control conducted an experiment on 160 children between the ages of 5 and 151. The researchers asked each child to toss a fair coin in private and to record the outcome (white or black) on a paper sheet, and said they would only reward children who report white. Half the students were explicitly told not to cheat and the others were not given any explicit instructions. Differences were observed in the cheating rates in the instruction and no instruction groups, as well as some differences across children’s characteristics within each group.

  1. Identify the population of interest and the sample in this study.

Ans: Children between the ages of 5 and 15. Sample size is 160 children between 5 and 15.

  1. Comment on whether or not the results of the study can be generalized to the population, and if the findings of the study can be used to establish causal relationships.

Ans: It is an observation study. This cannot be used to establish causal relationships. The study could be generalized to the public if the sample was truly randomized and the sample was drawn thoughout the nation (though I suspect that n = 160 may be too low.)

Reading the paper. (1.28, p. 31) Below are excerpts from two articles published in the NY Times:

  1. An article titled Risks: Smokers Found More Prone to Dementia states the following:

“Researchers analyzed data from 23,123 health plan members who participated in a voluntary exam and health behavior survey from 1978 to 1985, when they were 50-60 years old. 23 years later, about 25% of the group had dementia, including 1,136 with Alzheimer’s disease and 416 with vascular dementia. After adjusting for other factors, the researchers concluded that pack-a- day smokers were 37% more likely than nonsmokers to develop dementia, and the risks went up with increased smoking; 44% for one to two packs a day; and twice the risk for more than two packs.”

Based on this study, can we conclude that smoking causes dementia later in life? Explain your reasoning.

Ans: It is an observational study, and not an experiment. It is hard to conclude that smoking causes dementia as there appears to be bias also as there were volunteers and not random selections.Also, we dont have insight into other factors.

  1. Another article titled The School Bully Is Sleepy states the following:

“The University of Michigan study, collected survey data from parents on each child’s sleep habits and asked both parents and teachers to assess behavioral concerns. About a third of the students studied were identified by parents or teachers as having problems with disruptive behavior or bullying. The researchers found that children who had behavioral issues and those who were identified as bullies were twice as likely to have shown symptoms of sleep disorders.”

A friend of yours who read the article says, “The study shows that sleep disorders lead to bullying in school children.” Is this statement justified? If not, how best can you describe the conclusion that can be drawn from this study?

Ans: The conclusion can be drawn that there is a correlation but not necessarily a causation. The study doesn’t explain the selction of students- local or random.

Exercise and mental health. (1.34, p. 35) A researcher is interested in the effects of exercise on mental health and he proposes the following study: Use stratified random sampling to ensure rep- resentative proportions of 18-30, 31-40 and 41-55 year olds from the population. Next, randomly assign half the subjects from each age group to exercise twice a week, and instruct the rest not to exercise. Conduct a mental health exam at the beginning and at the end of the study, and compare the results.

  1. What type of study is this?

Ans: Prospective experiment.

  1. What are the treatment and control groups in this study?

Ans: Treatment: excercising twice a week.
Control: Not excercising at all.

  1. Does this study make use of blocking? If so, what is the blocking variable?

Ans: The blocks are ages 18-30, 31-40, and 41-55.

  1. Does this study make use of blinding?

Ans: The study does not use blinding.

  1. Comment on whether or not the results of the study can be used to establish a causal rela- tionship between exercise and mental health, and indicate whether or not the conclusions can be generalized to the population at large.

Ans: A causal relationship could be established as both samplings and assignments were random.

  1. Suppose you are given the task of determining if this proposed study should get funding. Would you have any reservations about the study proposal?

Ans: I cant recommend to restrict a group from exercising, does not sound right.

  1. Alessandro Bucciol and Marco Piovesan. “Luck or cheating? A field experiment on honesty with children”. In: Journal of Economic Psychology 32.1 (2011), pp. 73-78. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1307694↩︎