Reference no: EM133077752

Does smoking cause cancer? Does smoking cause death? Does advertising cause people to smoke? In U.S. courts, plaintiff's attorneys and in some cases, state governments, have successfully argued that cigarette companies are responsible for the health problems and even deaths associated with long-term smoking.

But a U.K.-based tobacco company is basing a legal defense on the notion that a lack of certainty remains over whether or not cigarettes cause cancer. They claim that the only evidence for this is statistical association and that many other factors are also statistically associated with cancer (i.e., socioeconomic status, childhood experiences, ethnicity, personality, and diet). The company claimed that no experimental evidence isolates the extent to which smoking truly causes cancer, and the defense was successful. Many lawsuits in U.S. courts name the brand that a smoker first started smoking even in they smoked many brands over the years. This tactic is based on the assumption that the branding and advertising efforts initially caused a person to smoke, but research evidence on this point is mixed. Researchers are now turning their attention toward experiments testing hypotheses related to the effectiveness of anti-smoking advertisements - particularly those aimed at adolescents - to determine if advertising influences them to smoke and if fear or social risk appeals are more effective in stemming smoking. The extent to which the researchers can truly establish causal evidence eventually will boil down to control.

Design an experiment to test the hypothesis that "advertising influences adolescents to start smoking":

-Define your independent variable and how you will manipulate it during your experiment.

-Define and discuss how you will measure your dependent variable

-Define a control group and discuss its role in your experiment

-How will you select and assignment your experimental subjects to groups

-Define and discuss how you will control extraneous variables

-What, if any ethical issues present themselves in your experimental design?