1. A clinical psychologist wants to determine whether group therapy sessions are

Question

1. A clinical psychologist wants to determine whether group therapy sessions are effective in treating anxiety disorders. He has 20 clients from a therapy group complete an anxiety inventory where higher scores indicate increased levels of anxiety and compares their scores to published norms for the general population. To answer the psychologist’s question, we can set it up as a hypothesis testing problem and use the data collected to answer it.

-What statistical test would be appropriate in this case? Explain the rationale for your answer.

- Would the test be right-tailed, left-tailed or two-tailed? Explain the rationale for your answer.

- Describe a potentially confounding variable and explain how that might affect the conclusions from the study.

Explanation / Answer

a) T test as population variance is not known and n < 30

b) Left tail as we want to know whether the scores of anxiety have decreased or not

c) A confounding variable is an outside influence that changes the effect of a dependent and independentvariable. This extraneous influence is used to influence the outcome of an experimental design.

Number of sessions is a confounding variable here. So, result might depend on how many sessions a particular group has taken

In this question, we can easily set up a hypothesis problem and test whether group therapy sessions are effective in treating anxiety disorders. This says that mean anxiety disorders score is same in group therapy. We can use t -test for this becuase sample size is less than 30 and standard deviation is unknown.

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