In: Statistics and Probability
Suppose the owners of a new bed and breakfast establishment are interested in conducting an experiment to determine effective advertisement strategies for increasing the number of reservations. The bed and breakfast owners intend to rotate advertisements for 12 weeks between a travel website, a travel magazine and a local billboard. Customers making reservations will be asked if they saw the advertisement. In this experiment, the independent variable has how many levels?
A) 1
B) 2
C) 3
D) 4
E) 0
Answer: (C) 3
Explanation:
When it is said that the owners are interested in determining effective adverstisement strategies, it means that they want to decide on which platform (i.e. a website, a magazine etc. ) should they post their advertisement. And therefore, the independent variable in this experiment is "The platform on which the advertisement is to be published for a certain period of time". And the dependent variable is "Whether or not the customers making the reservation actually say the advertisement".
And it is clearly mentioned that there are 3 platforms being considered by the owners for publishing their advertisement on namely a travel website, a travel magazine and a local billboard. Hence, in this experiment the independent variable has 3 levels.