In: Statistics and Probability
You want to determine if eating more fruits reduces a person’s chance of
developing cancer. You watch people over the years and ask them to tell you how
many servings of fruit they eat each day. You then record who develops cancer.
Is this an observation or an experiment? Why?
Here in this situation You watch people over the years and ask them to tell you how many servings of fruit they eat each day. Is this an observation or an experiment.
The main difference between observation and experiment have to discuss.
An the observational studies the researchers don't interfere on the way the data is collected. They merely observe,such as in an investigation of how regularly studying improves marks,the researchers sample people from the population who studied regularly and those who didn't and then collected the average marks obtained by each group.
Whereas in an Experiment the researchers interfere on how data are collected. In experiment each case or subject is randomly assigned to treatment groups,that is to say each subject have an equal chance of being in both the groups. Such studies help us to establish casual connections between the response variable and explanatory variables because even if there exists any confounding variable,random assignment makes sure that they are equally likely spread in both the groups.
To sum up, the main difference between observational studies and experiment is that in observational study there is no random assignment whereas in experiment there is random assignment.
So obviously this is an observation not an experiment. Here there is no randomness for collecting data.