For many years, the medically accepted practice of giving aid to a person experi

Question

For many years, the medically accepted practice of giving aid to a person experiencing a heart attack was to have the person who placed the emergency call administer chest compression (CC) plus standard mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (MMR) to the heart attack patient until the emergency response team arrived. However, some researchers believed that CC alone would be a more effective approach. In the 1990s a study was conducted in Seattle in which 518 cases were randomly assigned to treatments: 278 to CC plus standard MMR and 240 to CC alone. A total of 64 patients survived the heart attack: 29 in the group receiving CC plus standard MMR, and 35 in the group receiving CC alone. A test of significance was conducted on the following hypotheses. H0 : The survival rates for the two treatments are equal. Ha : The treatment that uses CC alone produces a higher survival rate. This test resulted in a pvalue of 0.0761.

(a) Interpret what this pvalue measures in the context of this study.

(b) Based on this p-value and study design, what conclusion should be drawn in the context of this study? Use a significance level of = 0.05.

(c) Based on your conclusion in part (b), which type of error, Type I or Type II, could have been made? What is one potential consequence of this error?

Explanation / Answer

(a)

The p-value shows the probabilty of finding the study results if null hypothesis is true.

(b)

Since p-value is greater than 0.05 so we fail to reject the null hypothesis. That is we cannot conclude that the treatment that uses CC alone produces a higher survival rate.

(c)

Here we fail to reject the null hypothesis so type II error is possible.

That is researcher incorrectly conclude that the survival rates for the two treatments are equal while actually the treatment that uses CC alone produces a higher survival rate.

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