4 ms·

In the context of experiment design, you do this because you want to know whether any apparent difference between the groups is plausibly an artifact of the ran

• nonbel 8y ago
  >"the goal of an experiment is to determine whether the difference is because of the treatment." I doubt this is really the goal of an experiment like this. The goal would actually be to figure out whether changing their procedures/whatever would make them more money in the future than it would cost to do the change.
  • rwilson4 8y ago
    In this particular example, the "treatment" is implementation of ergonomic practices, and the "response" is worker productivity. If we divide a workplace into two segments, there almost certainly will be some difference in worker productivity between the segments, having nothing to do with implementation of ergonomic practices and just having to do with the inherit variance of individual productivity contributing to the group. If the difference is productivity is large enough, you start thinking the ergonomic practices might have something to do with it. Statistics makes these principles more precise through concepts like statistical power, significance, and confidence intervals. Proper analysis of such an experiment would allow a company to compare the cost of the ergonomic processes with the benefit of the increased productivity attributable to those processes. This in turn would indeed allow them to make more money!