Patrick Doyle

AP Stats
p. 26 Case Closed

1. Data Analysis

a. Who: Fifty patients with polio

What: Magnets

Why: To find out if magnets reduce pain of suffering by patients

When: N/A

Where: N/A

How: Active and inactive magnets were applied to a painful section of the polio.

By Whom: Doctors conducting the research.

b. .
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0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Active

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0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Inactive
 c. I noticed in the graphs that the active magnets reduced the pain more than the

inactive magnets. The inactive data shows most patients reporting high pain,

while the active data shows the patients reported mostly moderate pain with few

extremes higher and lower than the moderation.

d. The mean for the active group is 4.38. The mean for the inactive group is 8.43.

The difference between the two groups is 4.05.

2. Producing Data

a. The data was produced to answer a current question.

b. The design of this study shows that it is an experiment. It is justified as an

experiment because, during experiments, something is done to the patients to

observe their response.

c. The magnets were chosen without knowing if they were active or inactive, so that

there was little chance of bias. Doctors and patients couldn’t say false pain

ratings that would either show that active magnets reduce suffering or are the

same as inactive magnets. The data is completely truthful due to this random

picking.

d. Yes it would matter, because, as stated earlier, there could be untruthful pain

ratings that would either support or disagree with statement that magnets reduce

pain.

3. Probability

a. I would say that the percent of the time the difference of the pain ratings is greater

than 0 would fifty percent. This conclusion was reached because the graph is

symmetrical with one peak in the center. Since both sides are almost equal, the
 chance of it being over 0 is fifty.

b. The chance of the pain ratings being greater than 4.05 is nearly zero.

4. Inference

a. I would estimate that the difference in mean pain relief would be that the active

magnets would be close to half of the inactive magnets. I concluded this by

looking at the present data, which showed active magnets reduce pain. With this

in mind, I believe that the mean pain relief of active magnets will be near half of

inactive magnets because of the reduced pain by each active magnet.

b. I would conclude that active magnets do reduce pain better than inactive magnets

because the data shows more patients with inactive magnets had a more moderate

pain while, most inactive patients still had a high pain.