Part 2. A drug company is advertising a new drug that helps people recover from

Question

Part 2. A drug company is advertising a new drug that helps people recover from jet lag faster. You are skeptical, so you conduct an experiment to test their claim. In your experiment, 100 people are flown from San Francisco to Tokyo. During the flight, half the participants are randomly given the drug company's new drug. The other half of the participants are given a placebo (i.e., sugar pill) during the flight. Six hours after they land, all participants are asked to rate how sleepy and disoriented they feel on a scale from 1 to 10. What are some of the potential biases in this experiment? How do you think you could adjust the procedure to improve the internal validity?

Explanation / Answer

the following errors or biases are possible in the experiment-

random error - it is the lack of precision in the results as the size of popuation is very small. vin this experiment out of the world population we choose just 100 passengers travelling in a flight to be our sample.hence the sample is very small as compared to the population and generalised results are not precise.

selection bias - this stands when the selection method is not appropriate. in the experiment selecting all the subjects from a flight is quiet a strong bias as the passengers might be of the same income group as the cost of tickets woud be more or less the same and also they cannot be considered as a randomly selected sample as the study is meant for all the flights

information bias- this is the bias which arises from inadequacy in gathering information about the sample. the experiment did not test the fatigue and other as pects of mental and physical health related to sleep which makes it nearly impossible for them to conclude how has the pill changed their reaction and whether it was effective or not.

internal validity is the measure which tells us that how well the experiment has been conducted. it is based on the controlling of confounding variables. confounding variables are the other factors within the subject as well as the environment which effect the dependent variable. if confounding are controlled effectively i.e. they are less then the internal validity of an experiment increases. here the confounding variables are the quantity and the type of food intake by people specially food which resists sleep like coffee intake, the previous mind set which is not measured and includes the amount of exhaustion of a subject along with the sleep level before the experiment as well as their routines after landing which includesthe amount of rest they take in those 6 hours after landing, the problems they face, the stress levels etc. hence by controlling maximum of the confounding variable the internal validity can be iincreased. steps to do that may include similar behavior with everyone, instructing the staff to give them same quantity and variety of food and beverages despite of what they ask for, departing the luggage of everyone at the same time so they can return to their routine at the same time with the same effort and measurement of the condition before the experiment so that analyses can be made accurate by the coparison method.

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