Chapter 1 Test Questions
1. Which of the following is NOT a role of the statistician according to Abelson?
a. curious detective
b. honest attorney
c. good storyteller
d. moral advocate
2. A series of studies is used to demonstrate the usefulness of a theory. This process is
called
a. replication
b. duplication
c. inferential testing
d. demonstrativeness
3. True or false: Theories are often proven or disproven in science.
a. true
b. false
4. Historically, which is the oldest form of statistics?
a. descriptive
b. inferential
c. parametric
d. nonparametric
5. Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of a good theory?
a. provable
b. testable hypotheses
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, Statistics: A Gentle Introduction (3rd ed.): Test Bank
c. provocative
d. grandness
e. all of the above
6. Who wrote that “not [ever] being wrong” was even worse than being wrong in science?
a. Nightingale
b. Pauli
c. Prusiner
d. Abelson
7. Anxiety was measured in a group of anxious elderly patients who were divided into two
groups. One group received a new anti-anxiety drug and the other a placebo. The
operational definition of the dependent variable is
a. anxiety
b. not specified
c. anxious elderly patients
d. all of the above
e. none of the above
8. The word placebo comes from Latin and means
a. untrue
b. fake belief
c. I shall believe
d. placid
9. Some patients in a control group will get well because of their belief that they are
receiving the real treatment. This phenomenon is known as the
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, Statistics: A Gentle Introduction (3rd ed.): Test Bank
a. experimenter effect
b. placebo effect
c. Hawthorne effect
d. belief effect
e. all of the above
10. If we randomly choose names from the phone book, call them, and determine whether
they are registered voters, does this process result in a random sample of voters?
a. yes
b. no
11. Which of the following results in an abuse of statistical power?
a. too large a sample
b. too small a sample
c. a nonrandom sample
d. a correlative experimental design
e. all of the above
12. Which of the following was NOT presented as one of the eight questions of any study
or survey?
a. Who was surveyed?
b. Were the participants paid?
c. How many people participated?
d. Did the survey have too many questions or items?
e. Was causation assumed from a correlational study?
13. A study linked a high blood pressure medicine to an increased risk of heart attacks.
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