Suppose you are on a jury in a trial someday. How could you encounter Simpson's Paradox?
a. You could see data that were collected from two different studies, giving you two different results.
b. One side could present the data using two variables, and the other side could break the same data down by a third variable that reverses the direction of the results.
c. One side could use counts to summarize the data, and the other side could use percentages or rates, reversing the direction of the relationship.
d. All of the above.
Q. 2When you see a group of individuals summarized into a single contingency table containing only one row variable and one column variable, what should your reaction be?
a. Great; this data is clear and easy to understand.
b. I need to find out if the data have been collapsed over some important third variable.
c. This is garbage; there is always more to a statistical relationship than just two simple variables.
d. None of the above.
Q. 3What does Simpson's Paradox teach us?
a. The nature of an association can reverse direction when data from several groups are combined to form a single group.
b. Omitting a third variable can mask the true relationship between two categorical variables.
c. It is dangerous to summarize information over groups, especially if the individuals were not randomly assigned to those groups.
d. All of the above.
Q. 4One of the common ways the media misrepresent statistics about risk is that the reported risk is not necessarily your risk. What is the underlying problem that causes this?
a. Not establishing a causal link between the variables.
b. Confounding variables, which may differ for you and those in the study.
c. Unless you personally participated in the study, your personal risk cannot be calculated.
d. Since risks describe what proportion of the population will encounter a certain situation, they cannot be used to find any individual's chances of encountering that situation.
Q. 5Suppose a new medical study at a research university shows that a woman's chance of developing breast cancer triples if she is overweight. You know that the American Cancer Society says that the chance of a woman developing breast cancer in her lifetime is 1 in 9 . Does being overweight now increase a woman's chance to 1 in 3 of developing breast cancer?
a. Yes; 1/9 3 = 1/3.
b. No; the baseline risk for women like the ones in this study may have been different from the American Cancer Society's lifetime risk.
c. No; unless a causal relationship is established, you should just ignore all risk statistics.
d. None of the above.
Q. 6Suppose you hear a report that says the chances of developing lung cancer increase by 10 times, just by living in the city versus the country. How do you interpret this?
a. You had better move to the country; 10 times is a huge difference.
b. You need to find out what the baseline risk is and what confounding variables were adjusted for before you can determine how serious this is for you.
c. You should just stay put; no one could possibly come up with a valid statistic that measures this.
d. You should ignore the results. Your increased risk should depend on whether or not your house contains radon gas, not on whether the house is in the city or the country.
Q. 7When researchers report relative risks and/or odds ratios, they often adjust them to account for __________.
Fill in the blank(s) with correct word
Q. 8When there is a treatment or behavior for which researchers want to study risk, they often compare it to the __________ risk, which is the risk without the treatment or behavior.
Fill in the blank(s) with correct word
Q. 9A table that displays the number of individuals who fall into each combination of categorical variables is called a(n) __________ table.
Fill in the blank(s) with correct word
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