1. A pharmacist measures baseline blood pressure in patients based on one of fiv

Question

1. A pharmacist measures baseline blood pressure in patients based on one of five ethnic groups that make up the population of her clientele. She then measures their blood pressure again after they have taken a blood pressure medication for 3 months.

a. In order to analyze whether there is a difference from this intervention, what test should be used?

b. Let’s say instead, she measured only whether their blood pressure went up, down or stayed the same, what test should be used?

c. Let’s say instead, she rank ordered the patients from lowest blood pressure to highest blood pressure, what test should be used?

2.  An ANOVA analysis is undertaken to see whether 1) usual care, 2) diet, 3) exercise or 4) the combination of diet and exercise is effective in lowering cholesterol levels. The ANOVA statistic converts to a “p” value of 0.028. What is the specific inference of this result (i.e. not just whether its statistically significant or not.)

Explanation / Answer

Question 1

Part a

Here, pharmacist wants to check the hypothesis whether there is a statistically significant difference in the average blood pressure after the medication of three months or not. This means, two samples are related and sample data is of ‘before-after’ type. Also, we do not have any advance information regarding the population variation or standard deviations. So, we should use paired t-test for the given scenario.

Part b

For the given scenario, pharmacist only use three categories for measuring blood pressure whether blood pressure went up, down or stayed same. Here, we do not have actual observations and therefore we need to use non-parametric test. For checking the whether there is significant difference in the blood pressures before and after medication, we should use Wilcoxon signed rank test.

Part c

For the given scenario, pharmacist use the rank orders from lowest blood pressure to highest blood pressure and she wants to check significant difference after the medication of three months. For checking this hypothesis, she should use Wilcoxon signed rank test so that it will measure all rank ordered data.

Question 2

For the given ANOVA test, the p-value is given as 0.028 which is less than level of significance or alpha value 0.05. So, at 5% level of significance, the result is statistically significant. So, we reject the null hypothesis that there is no any significant difference in the effect of usual care, diet, exercise and combination of diet and exercise. So, there is sufficient evidence that the effects of the usual care, diet, exercise and combination of diet and exercise are not same.

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