Welcome to HW1. Read Chapter 1 before doing the HW.
Here is a student example–
HW Chapter 1
Statistics or Sadistics?
It’s Up to You
Find an article you like and briefly describe and name one descriptive and one inferential statistic. Please briefly discuss how the terms “data,” “sample,” and “population” are used in this article.
Hatonen et al. (2012) studied the effect of caffeine and carbohydrate consumption on glucose and insulin responses.
Descriptive statistics are used in this article to describe mean fasting (name of one descriptive stats!) and postprandial blood glucose levels after consumption of varying amounts of carbohydrate and caffeine. Figure 1 in the article provides an illustration of mean glucose levels at specific time points over the course of 120 minutes for each type of meal consumed. The study sample was comprised of twelve individuals: one male and eleven females.
These authors used inferential statistics to draw the conclusion that postprandial glucose and insulin levels are not significantly affected by caffeinated coffee consumption. Specifically, statistical significance was assessed using the non-parametric Wilcoxon test (name of an inferential stats) with Bonferroni corrections. The authors used a P value of < 0.05 to determine statistical significance.
In this article, the sample size was 12. The authors made generalizations regarding caffeine consumption and postprandial glucose levels to the healthy, non-diabetic population. The small sample size must be taken into consideration when interpreting this data and making generalizations to larger populations. In this study, data collected included glucose and insulin levels from 12 study participants after consuming various amounts of caffeine and carbohydrate.