2. Suppose you are a researcher interested in early childhood development. You w

Question

2. Suppose you are a researcher interested in early childhood development. You want to know whether or not reading to children at a young age improves their ability to concentrate when they enter school. Because there are many factors that probably cause parents to read to their children and for children to be better at concentrating, you decide to conduct a randomized control trial. You gather a group of 1,000 willing participants 500 of them to read to their children for ½ an houreveryday w their children for 1 hour every day. You have the following where the numbers represent the mean value of each outcome/characteristic for the groups: be more likely to and randomly assign hile the other 500 are to read to data collected for the two groups, Group Outcome Child's Concentration Characteristics: Family Income (S) Single Parent (%) White (%) Child is Male (%) ½ Hour 7.3 50,235 1 Hour 8.8 51,189 23 68 50 24 51 2a. What is your estimate ofthe effect of an extra ½ hour on reading on a child's ability to concentrate? 2b. Do you believe that this estimate is causal? Explain why or why not

Explanation / Answer

2a.

The treatment effect of an extra 1/2 hour on child's concentration is difference of child's concentration for 1 hour group and 1/2 hour group.

So, treatment effect = 8.8 - 7.3 = 1.5

2b.

As, all other variables/characteristics in the study has almost the same values in both the groups, the estimate is causal. That is, Family income, Single parent (%), White (%) and Child is Male (%) variables are almost same in both the groups, so the difference (effect) in Child's concentration is caused by different treatments (the reading time - 1/2 hr or 1 hr) to both groups. So, the estimate is causal.

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