Question

You are a nurse working for the Public Health Unit in Hamilton, Ontario. You know that each year many people seek treatment from their family doctors for colds, and that many people need to take time off work to recover from them. A drug company has asked you to assist with a study to test a new drug that they have developed to prevent colds. You recruit 100 women and 200 men from a population of 100,000 people that volunteer to be in the study. At the end of the study, you find that 38% of women caught a cold and 51% of men caught a cold. Use these study data to answer the following questions. Show all supporting calculations.

1. It would appear from comparing the proportion of women and men that caught a cold, that the drug may be more effective in women. Can you conclude this? Assume α=0.05.

2. Can you conclude the drug is more effective in women than men if you assume α=0.01?

3. The drug company claims that the drug is equally effective for men and women. Can you reject the company’s claim? Use the same statistical procedure and level of significance that you used in question a to answer this question.   

4. What is the p-value for the statistical test you conducted in question c?

5. What is an alternative statistical procedure that could be used to answer question c? What would the test statistic and associated p-value be for this statistical procedure?  

Answer 1