Write a short editorial to the New York Times (NYT) as a counterargument to a pr

Question

Write a short editorial to the New York Times (NYT) as a counterargument to a prior NYT editorial's conclusions about the results of a breast cancer study described in the video: The Fish and Chip Guy won’t accept the Null Hypothesis. Your editorial should be convincing, give a precise and accurate final conclusion for the study, and speak to the common reader. http://media.pearsoncmg.com/cmg/pmmg_mml_shared/video_player/dev_redirect/mathxl_video_player.html?from_flash=true&video=/aw/aw_mml_shared_1/statistics/StatTalk/video/14_stattalk

Explanation / Answer

The null hypothesis for the study conducted was that there is no effect of fat on increasing breast cancer chances.

Because of the very small p value ( = 0.07 ), the null hypothesis could not be rejected, because to safely reject the null hypothesis, a higher p-value was needed from the survey conducted. But this doesn't mean that null hypothesis is accepted, rather it means that the effort to reject the null hypothesis failed.

The editorial should not write such a strong statement as 'there is no effect of fat on increasing breast cancer chances', rather it should write that 'no sufficient evidence could be gathered from the survey to prove that fat consumption increases chances of breast cancer'.

This is because only this survey failed to reject the null hypothesis, but it's quite possible that in a next survey sufficient evidence could be gathered to reject that hypothesis.

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