Question

Questions 4 - 12 Refer to the following scenario. Due to the recent COVID-19 pandemic, researchers have been working tirelessly looking for treatments to aid the sick. Two groups of 21 patients (total N = 42) volunteered to receive treatment in a controlled hospital environment. They observed the effectiveness of the treatment drug hydroxychloroquine (Drug H) versus a Japanese pharmaceutical called favipiravir (Drug F). The researchers measured the percent of effectiveness (ranging from 0-100) across the patients after one week of treatment. Drug H was hypothesized to have a higher rates of effectiveness compared to Drug F. Here are the descriptive statistics from the data: Drug H: M1 = 81 Drug F: M2=29 Error term (standard error) = 5

Answer 1

Drug H was 'hypothesised' to have a better recovery rate than Drug F. This is our alternate hypothesis. The null hypothesis is usually taken as the 'established norm'. Since Drug H was used in comparison to Drug F, we may conclude from our domain knowledge that Drug H performs atleast as good as Drug F, we want to test whether the later performs 'any better' or not. Thus, we may safely consider the null hypothesis to be that both the drugs perform similarly.

i.e an appropriate null hypothesis would be 'Two groups would have equally effective rates of recovery'.