3.60 Ethics and statistics news. Studies using statistical methods to analyze data and draw conclusions should be conducted in an ethical manner. Visit the website www.sciencedaily.com/news/science_society/ethics. Read one of the articles posted on this site and then write a short report summarizing the major ideas in the article. Be sure to address the issues that we discussed in this chapter regarding the collection and use of data.

3.61 Online behavioral advertising. The Federal Trade Commission Staff Report “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising” defines behavioral advertising as “the tracking of a consumer’s online activities over time—including the searches the consumer has conducted, the Web pages visited and the content viewed—in order to deliver advertising targeted to the individual consumer’s interests.” The report suggests four governing concepts for their proposals. These are (1) transparency and control: when companies collect information from consumers for advertising, they should tell consumers how the data will be collected, and consumers should be given a choice about whether to allow the data to be collected; (2) security and data retention: data should be kept secure and should be retained only as long as they are needed; (3) privacy: before data are used in a way that differs from promises made when they were collected, consent should be obtained from the consumer; and (4) sensitive data: affirmative express consent should be obtained before using any sensitive data.³⁵ Write a report discussing your opinions concerning online behavioral advertising and the four governing concepts. Pay particular attention to issues related to the ethical collection and use of statistical data.

3.62 Confidentiality at NORC. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) conducts a large number of surveys and has established procedures for protecting the confidentiality of its survey participants. For its Survey of Consumer Finances, NORC provides a pledge to participants regarding confidentiality. This pledge is available at norc.org. Review the pledge and summarize its key parts. Do you think that the pledge adequately addresses issues related to the ethical collection and use of data? Explain your answer.

3.63 Make it an experiment! In the following observational studies, describe changes that could be made to the data collection process that would result in an experiment rather than an observational study. Also, offer suggestions about unseen biases or lurking variables that may be present in the studies as they are described here.

1. A friend of yours likes to play Texas hold ’em. Every time that he tells you about his playing, he says that he won.

2. In an introductory statistics class, you notice that the students who sit in the first two rows of seats had higher scores on the first exam than the other students in the class.

3.64 Name the designs. What is the name for each of these study designs?

1. A study to compare two methods of preserving wood started with boards of southern white pine. Each board was ripped from end to end to form two edge-matched specimens. One was assigned to Method A; the other was assigned to Method B.

2. A survey on youth and smoking contacted by telephone 300 smokers and 300 nonsmokers, all 14 to 22 years of age.

3. Does air pollution induce DNA mutations in mice? Starting with 40 male and 40 female mice, 20 of each sex were housed in a polluted industrial area downwind from a steel mill. The other 20 of each sex were housed at an unpolluted rural location 30 kilometers away.

3.65 Price promotions and consumer expectations. A researcher studying the effect of price promotions on consumer expectations makes up two different histories of the store price of a hypothetical brand of laundry detergent for the past year. Students in a marketing course view one price history or the other on a computer. Some students see a steady price, while others see regular promotions that temporarily cut the price. The students are then asked what price they would expect to pay for the detergent. Is this study an experiment? Why? What are the explanatory and response variables?

3.66 Calcium and healthy bones. Adults need to eat foods or supplements that contain enough calcium to maintain healthy bones. Calcium intake is generally measured in milligrams per day (mg/d), and one measure of healthy bones is total body bone mineral density measured in grams per centimeter squared (TBBMD, g/cm2). Suppose that you want to study the relationship between calcium intake and TBBMD.

1. Design an observational study to study the relationship.

2. Design an experiment to study the relationship.

3. Compare the relative merits of your two designs. Which do you prefer? Give reasons for your answer.

3.67 Choose the type of study. Give an example of a question about pets and their owners, their behavior, or their opinions that would best be answered by

1. a sample survey.

2. an observational study that is not a sample survey.

3. an experiment.

3.68 Compare the fries. Do consumers prefer the fries from Burger King or from McDonald’s? Design a blind test in which the source of the fries is not identified. Describe briefly an experiment with matched pairs design that you could use to investigate this question. How will you use randomization?

3.69 Bicycle gears. How does the time it takes a bicycle rider to travel 100 meters depend on which gear is used and how steep the course is? It may be, for example, that higher gears are faster on level ground, but lower gears are faster on steep inclines. Discuss the design of a two-factor experiment to investigate this issue, using one bicycle with three gears and one rider. How will you use randomization?

3.70 Design an experiment. The previous two exercises illustrate the use of statistically designed experiments to answer questions that arise in everyday life. Select a question of interest to you that an experiment might answer and carefully discuss the design of an appropriate experiment.

3.71 Two ways to ask sensitive questions. Sample survey questions are usually read from a computer screen. In a computer-aided personal interview (CAPI), the interviewer reads the questions and enters the responses. In a computer-aided self interview (CASI), the interviewer stands aside, and the respondent reads the questions and enters responses. One method almost always shows a higher percent of subjects admitting use of illegal drugs. Which method? Explain why.

3.72 Your institutional review board. Your college or university has an institutional review board that screens all studies that use human subjects. Get a copy of the document that describes this board. (You can probably find it online.)

1. According to this document, what are the duties of the board?

2. How are members of the board chosen? How many members are not scientists? How many members are not employees of the college? Do these members have some special expertise, or are they simply members of the “general public”?

3.73 Use of data produced by the government. Data produced by the government are often available free or at low cost to private users. For example, satellite weather data produced by the U.S. National Weather Service are available free to TV stations for their weather reports and to anyone on the Internet. Opinion 1: Government data should be available to everyone at minimal cost. Opinion 2: The satellites are expensive, and the TV stations are making a profit from their weather services, so they should share the cost. European governments, for example, charge TV stations for weather data. Which opinion do you support, and why?

3.74 Should we ask for the consent of the parents? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in a survey of teenagers, asked the subjects if they were sexually active. Those who said Yes were then asked, “How old were you when you had sexual intercourse for the first time?” Should consent of parents be required to ask minors about sex, drugs, and other such issues, or is consent of the minors themselves enough? Give reasons for your opinion.

3.75 A theft experiment. Students sign up to be subjects in a psychology experiment. When they arrive, they are told that interviews are running late and are taken to a waiting room. The experimenters then stage a theft of a valuable object left in the waiting room. Some subjects are alone with the thief, and others are in pairs; these are the treatments being compared. Will the subject report the theft? The students had agreed to take part in an unspecified study, and the true nature of the experiment is explained to them afterward. Do you think this study is ethically okay?

3.76 A cheating experiment. A psychologist conducts the following experiment. She measures the attitude of subjects toward cheating and then has them play a game rigged so that winning without cheating is impossible. The computer that organizes the game also records—unknown to the subjects—whether or not they cheat. Then attitude toward cheating is retested. Subjects who cheat tend to change their attitudes to find cheating more acceptable. Those who resist the temptation to cheat tend to condemn cheating more strongly on the second test of attitude. These results confirm the psychologist’s theory. This experiment tempts subjects to cheat. The subjects are led to believe that they can cheat secretly when, in fact, they are observed. Is this experiment ethically objectionable? Explain your position.