Imagine that you are a health care provider who is interested in the effects of
ID: 3063149 • Letter: I
Question
Imagine that you are a health care provider who is interested in the effects of different kinds of therapy on levels of clinical depression. Additionally, you are interested in possible age-related differences in depression scores. You are supplied with the data set containing the following variables:
Treatment group (Psychotherapy, Medication, or no treatment)
Depression_scores (Scores on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D). Higher scores indicate more severe symptoms of clinical depression).
Age (age groups of participants in the study).
First, we will see if there are differences in depression scores among the treatment groups.
Write your null and alternative hypotheses below.
Explanation / Answer
Since, at first, we are interested to test whether there are differences in depression scores among the treatment groups, the hypotheses would be:
Null hypothesis: mean depression score of those patients receiving Psychotherapy = mean depression score of those patients receiving Medication = mean depression score of those patients receiving no treatment.
Alternative hypothesis: mean depression score of patients of at least 1 treatment group is different from the other groups.