Case Study Imagine you read about a study that claims there is a link between ta

Question

Case Study
Imagine you read about a study that claims there is a link between taking a specific supplement and a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
a) Describe how this study would have to have been conducted (method, design, etc.) to makes causal conclusions.
b)If it were a quasi-experimental study, what other conditions (list at least 3) could the study meet to infer causality?
C) What kinds of unscientific thinking should you be aware of as you review the study?

d) In terms of validity, what more information would you want to draw the conclusion that this supplement lowers the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease?

Case Study
Imagine you read about a study that claims there is a link between taking a specific supplement and a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
a) Describe how this study would have to have been conducted (method, design, etc.) to makes causal conclusions.
b)If it were a quasi-experimental study, what other conditions (list at least 3) could the study meet to infer causality?
C) What kinds of unscientific thinking should you be aware of as you review the study?

d) In terms of validity, what more information would you want to draw the conclusion that this supplement lowers the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease?

Case Study
Imagine you read about a study that claims there is a link between taking a specific supplement and a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
a) Describe how this study would have to have been conducted (method, design, etc.) to makes causal conclusions.
b)If it were a quasi-experimental study, what other conditions (list at least 3) could the study meet to infer causality?
C) What kinds of unscientific thinking should you be aware of as you review the study?

d) In terms of validity, what more information would you want to draw the conclusion that this supplement lowers the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease?

Explanation / Answer

a) The paper claims that a certain suppliment lowers the risk of Alzheimer’s disease. The foundation of this claim can be a diverse set of techniques, including a strong correlation between the dip in the risk with an increase in the supliment usage, or by showing a strong dependence between both the factors. Given the dataset of people having demographic information of the suppliment users with the non-users, a chi-square test can be performed for the catagorical attributes and 2-sample T test for the contineous attributes. Then, a regression model can be used to project the risk associated with different group of people in different ages.

b) Quasi designs fair better than pre-experimental studies as they employ a means to compare groups. The possible conditions that can justify the causality of the study are --

i) The size of the sample set, or the population size of the set taken as data is large enough to reduce any kind of biasness introduced by the lack of random sampling.

ii) Correlation of the sample set taken into consideratuin should be similar to the correlation of set of experiment with the random factor.

iii) The noise margin should be low as possible.

c) The acceptance of outliers for determing the trend and ignorance of overfitting of the data should be ignored before making any assumption.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse C
• Subjects

---

---

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.