Question

Quit Smoking: The New England Journal of Medicine published the results of a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment to study the effect of nicotine patches and the antidepressant bupropion on quitting smoking. The target for quitting smoking was the 8th day of the experiment. In this experiment researchers randomly assigned smokers to treatments. The following is an excerpt from this same study. “ A total of 311 subjects (34.8 percent) discontinued one or both medications. Seventy-nine subjects stopped treatment because of adverse events: 6 in the placebo group (3.8 percent), 16 in the nicotine-patch group (6.6 percent), 29 in the bupropion group (11.9 percent), and 28 in the combined treatment group (11.4 percent). The most common adverse events were insomnia and headache.” Recall that 160 smokers took the placebo and 244 smokers used nicotine patches. Could the researcher use this data with an inference procedure from this module to test a claim about (or to estimate the difference in) side effects from a placebo compared to nicotine patches?

yes, the % of side effects are large enough to see a difference

yes bc subjects were randomly assigned to treatment groups

no the conditions for use of a normal model sampling distribution of sample differences is not met

no the experiment did not randomly assign side effects

Answer 1

To test a claim about (or to estimate the difference in) side effects from a placebo compared to nicotine patches, each group includes at least 10 successes and 10 failures. Here success denotes having a side effects and failures denotes not having a side effects. For placebo, successes is 6 and failures is 160 - 6 = 154. For nicotine patches, successes is 16 and failure is 244 - 16 = 228. For placebo group, the count of successes is less than 5, so the conditions for use of a normal model sampling distribution of sample differences is not met.

So, the correct option would be

no the conditions for use of a normal model sampling distribution of sample differences is not met