A researcher suspects that ‘rapid smoking’, a behavioural therapy devised as a reduction aid for smokers, has no greater effect than a placebo treatment would have. The researcher places an advertisement in a newspaper, through which he recruits 19 subjects, all of whom smoke. He randomly assigns the 19 subjects to the experimental (rapid smoking) and control (placebo) groups (10 in the experimental group, nine in the control group). The subjects undergo a period of treatment, and the researcher compares the groups in terms of number of cigarettes smoked daily.
The results are as follows:
Experimental: 11, 21, 7, 19, 34, 20, 6, 15, 4, 10
Control: 39, 28, 43, 47, 38, 31, 30, 27, 40
Is the researcher’s contention supported by this data? Make a point of analysing the data in as many different ways as you can.