Author Question: Suppose within a short span of time, people in a certain town realize that there is an unusually ... (Read 172 times)

Zulu123 · **on:** Jul 24, 2018

Suppose within a short span of time, people in a certain town realize that there is an unusually high rate of leukemia among children in their town. Suppose someone calculated the odds of having that many cases in such a short time to be 1 in 15,000 . Which of the following immediate conclusions would not be correct?
a. Since the chance is only 1 out of 15,000, something in this town has to be causing our children to get sick. We need to take immediate action.
b. We should expect this phenomenon to happen in about 1 out of every 15,000 towns similar to this one, just by chance. There is no cause for alarm just yet.
c. It would be unusual if we did not occasionally see clusters of disease such as this one; this town may just be unlucky. Let's wait until more data is collected.
d. We should keep an eye on the situation but there is no reason to panic. This could very well be just a coincidence.

Question 2

If two measurement variables are both found to be changing over time, what does this mean?
a. It means there is a causal link between the two variables.
b. It means there is a common cause of the changes in both variables (possibly other than time).
c. It means that even though the two variables may be highly correlated, they could be completely unrelated in terms of cause and effect.
d. None of the above.