Reference no: EM132845859

A study was done with 644 cancer patients receiving chemotherapy at one of several cancer treatment centers across the United States. All the patients had suffered nausea in a previous round of chemotherapy, even though they were given standard anti-nausea medicines. Each patient was given one of three doses of ginger (the equivalent of ½ gram, 1 gram, or 1½ grams of ginger per day) or a dummy capsule that contained no ginger. The amount of ginger (0, ½, 1, or 1½ grams) each patient received was determined at random, so that 161 patients got each amount of ginger. Each patient was given a standard anti-nausea medicine in addition to the assigned amount of ginger. The patients took the medicines and the assigned amounts of ginger for six consecutive days, beginning three days 2 before chemotherapy. Each day the patients reported the amount of nausea they were experiencing on a scale from 0 (no nausea) to 10 (extreme nausea).

a) What is the response variable?

b) What are the (experimental) conditions of the study (that is, treatments)?

c) What is the experimental material? What are the experimental units?

d) What are the outside variables that are controlled? Is there a control/comparison group? If so, explain what the control/comparison group is.

e) Are treatments randomly assigned to the experimental units? Is the experimental material randomly selected from a larger population?

f) Is there replication within the experiment?