AN OBSERVATIONAL STUDY VERSUS A RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT
Keywords:
cause-and-effect conclusions, randomized experiment, observational study, GAISE.DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17654/0973563122004Abstract
Cause-and-effect conclusions cannot generally be made on the basis of an observational study, and that unlike with observational studies, cause-and-effect conclusions can generally be made on the basis of randomized experiments. These results are exhibited analyzing two famous medical investigations: one observational study and the other randomized experiment. This article may be used in teaching an introductory statistics course, because it contributes and supports the recommendations of The American Statistical Association Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) committee, which made six recommendations (Aliaga et al. [1]) and (Everson [3]) for teaching introductory statistics; and also, the 2016 GAISE College Report ASA Revision Committee.
Received: January 2, 2022
Accepted: February 8, 2022
References
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D. R. Appleton et al., Ignoring a covariate: an example of Simpson’s paradox, The American Statistician 50(4) (1996), 340-341.
M. Everson, GAISE 2015: New Report for a New Era, AMSTAT News, Vol. 456, 2015, 29 pp.
GAISE College Report ASA Revision Committee, Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education College Report 2016.
http://www.amstat.org/education/gaise.
H. J. Norton and G. Divine, Simpson’s paradox, and how to avoid it, Significance 12(4) (2015), 40-43.
E. H. Simpson, The interpretation of interaction in contingency tables, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 13 (1951), 238-241.
Steering Committee of the Physicians’ Health Study Research Group, Final report on the aspirin component of the ongoing physicians’ health study, New England Journal of Medicine 321(3) (1989), 129-135.
J. Utts and R. F. Heckard, Mind on Statistics, 6th ed., Melbourne: Cengage Learning Australia, 2021.
M. P. J. Vanderpump et al., The incidence of thyroid disorders in the community: a twenty-year follow-up of the Whickham survey, Clinical Endocrinology 43 (1995), 55-69.
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