Quantitative Analysis International and Public Affairs

U6500 Sections 1, 2, 3, 4/Fall 2015

Professor Yang
Homework #1: Introduction to Statistics and Research Design
Due in class: Tuesday September 15/Wednesday September 16
1.

Read the Star Ledger article (see Page 3) on breast-feeding and intelligence.
a. Briefly summarize the claims of the researchers.
b. Can you conclude from this article that breast-feeding causes children to become more
intelligent? Why or why not?
c. What additional information would you want to know about the study in order to justify
the purported conclusions?

2.

A typical hour of prime-time television shows three to five violent acts. Linking family
interviews and police records shows a clear association between time spent watching TV as a
child and later aggressive behavior.
a. Explain why this is an observational study rather than an experiment.
b. What are the explanatory and response variables?
c. Suggest several lurking variables describing a childs home life that may be confounded
with how much TV he or she watches. Explain why confounding makes it difficult to
conclude that more TV causes more aggressive behavior.

3.

Many studies have found that people who drink alcohol in moderation have lower risk of heart
attacks than either nondrinkers or heavy drinkers. Does alcohol consumption also improve
survival after heart attack? One study followed 1913 people who were hospitalized after
severe heart attacks. In the year before their heart attack, 47% of these people did not drink,
36% drank moderately, and 17% drank heavily. After four years, fewer of the moderate
drinkers had died.
a. Is this an observational study or an experiment? Why?
b. What are the explanatory and response variables?

4.

The Bayer Aspirin Web site claims that Nearly five decades of research now link aspirin to
the prevention of stroke and heart attacks. The most important evidence for this claim comes
from the Physicians Health Study, a large medical experiment involving 22,000 male
physicians. One group of about 11,000 physicians took an aspirin every second day, while the
rest took a placebo. After several years the study found that subjects in the aspirin group had
significantly fewer heart attacks than subjects in the placebo group.
a. Identify the experimental subjects, the factor and its levels, and the response variables
in the Physicians Health Study
b. Use a diagram to outline a completely randomized design for the Physicians Health
Study.
c. What does it mean to say that the aspirin group had significantly fewer heart attacks?

5.

How does smoking marijuana affect willingness to work? Canadian researchers persuaded
young adult men who used marijuana to live for 98 days in a planned environment. The
men earned money by weaving belts. They used their earnings to pay for meals and other
consumption and could keep any money left over. One group smoked two potent marijuana
cigarettes every evening. The other group smoked two weak marijuana cigarettes. All
subjects could buy more cigarettes but were given strong or weak cigarettes, depending on
their group. Did the weak and strong groups differ in work output and earnings?
a. Outline the design of the experiment.
b. The following table lists the names of the 20 subjects. Use Table B at line 131 (see
page 4) to carry out the randomization your design requires:
Abbott-01
Decker-05
Guttierrez-09
Lucero-13
Rosen-17
Afifi-02
Engel-06
Hwang-10
McNeill-14
Thompson-18
Brown-03
Fluharty-07
Iselin-11
Morse-15
Travers-19
Chen-04
Gerson-08
Kaplan-12
Quinones-16
Ullmann-20
6.

A university has 2000 male and 500 female faculty members. The equal opportunity
employment officer wants to poll the opinions of a random sample of faculty members. In
order to give adequate attention to female faculty opinion, he decides to choose a stratified
random sample of 200 males and 200 females. He has alphabetized lists of female and male
faculty members. Explain how you would assign labels and use random digits to choose the
desired sample. Enter Table B at line 122 (see page 4) and give the labels of the first 5
females and the first 5 males in the sample.

The Star Ledger Archive Date: 2002/05/12 Wednesday Page: 010 Section: NEWS Edition: FINAL Size: 805 words

Want your child's IQ higher? Breast-feed longer, says study

By MARC KAUFMAN for the WASHINGTON POST
Infants breast-fed for nine months grew up to be significantly more intelligent than infants breast-fed for one month or less,
according to a new study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Results from the study of more than 3,000 young men and women from Copenhagen, Denmark, strongly support the longsuggested, but never proven, conclusion that the act of breast-feeding not only makes babies healthier but smarter, too. "We
are really quite certain that what we are seeing here is the effect of the duration of breast-feeding on an individual's
intelligence," said June Machover Reinisch of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, one of
the authors of the study. "The question that remains is what exactly is the aspect of breast-feeding that results in the greater
intelligence." "The evidence is growing that breast-feeding is among the most important lifelong benefits a mother can give
to her child," she said. Reinisch also said the study, the first to measure the effects of breast-feeding well beyond childhood,
found that those who scored lowest in intelligence tests were disproportionately in the group that was breast-fed one month
or less.
Although public health officials, and even the infant formula industry, recommend breast-feeding as the best way to nourish
an infant for the first six to 12 months, most American babies are still bottle-fed during much of their infancy. The number
of mothers who begin breast-feeding has been increasing in recent years to almost 70 percent, but an infant formula
industry study found that only 31 percent of all infants are still being breast-fed at 6 months.
The JAMA findings, and related conclusions about the health and development benefits of breast-feeding, will add to the
already active public debate over how to encourage breast-feeding - which is most common among white and wealthier
women and least common among minority and poorer women. Studies have shown that many women never breast-feed or
stop quickly because of a wide range of ambivalent or negative signals from society. Researchers have identified reasons
including cultural biases against the practice, serious difficulties experienced by some mothers when they return to work,
limited availability of training in how to breast-feed, and the sometimes aggressive advertising and promotion of the infant
formula industry.
About half of all the infant formula used in the United States is purchased for poor women through the federal Special
Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children. The study could have an impact as well on the dynamics
of the infant formula market. A new type of infant formula, supplemented with two beneficial compounds found in breast
milk but not traditional formula, recently has come onto the market. Makers of the new formula say their studies indicate
that the added ingredients could be responsible for some of the benefits of breast milk on intelligence. While some previous
studies have suggested an association between breast-feeding and intelligence, the new study appears to provide the
strongest indication of an effect.
The research, funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health, used two large groups of Danish men and women who
had been studied since their mothers were pregnant with them between 1959 and 1961. When the children were 1 year old,
the mothers were questioned about how long they breast-fed their babies. One group of 973 was given a Wechsler IQ test,
an intensive, one-on-one assessment, while the other sample of 2,280 men were given intelligence tests when they entered
the Danish military. In both groups, those breast- fed for nine months scored significantly higher than those breast-fed for
less than a month.
Further supporting the conclusion that breast-feeding improves intelligence, researchers found a strong "dose effect" - a
gradual improvement based on the number of months of breast-feeding up to nine months, when the effect ended. Because
of previously studied health effects, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends one year of breast-feeding as
optimal.
Other studies have shown a correlation between breast-feeding and scores on intelligence tests, but some of that
relationship disappeared when complicating factors were taken into account. For instance, the children of mothers who are
better educated and wealthier would be expected to be healthier and to score higher on intelligence tests however they were
fed as infants. Their mothers would be statistically less likely to smoke, to be overweight, and to have large families - all
associated with less healthy children who do less well on intelligence tests.