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A Glass Of Wine A Day Keeps The Doctor Away Essay

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A glass of wine a day keeps the doctor away. Is it enough to just say this without any real evidence to support it? Is just wanting it to be true enough to convince you? The answer to these two questions could be the difference between acknowledging accurate information presented in a scientific article and accepting insufficient information presented in a lay article. Lay articles provide brief summaries on the concepts in documented research studies. Scientific articles thoroughly describe and report findings in research studies. In order for either article to be believable, important information should be included. This information includes the population of interest and the sample in the study, the independent and dependent variables and their levels, scale of measurement for each variable, the null and research hypothesis, the test statistic used and its significance level (p value or α value), results of the study, research errors, and the assumptions for the specific test statistic. According to Nolan and Heinzen (2011), authors of Essentials of Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, assumptions are, “Characteristics that we ideally require the population from which we are sampling to have (scaled DV, randomly selected, normally distributed) so that we can make accurate inferences (Nolan & Heinzen, 154).” Comparing a lay article to a scientific article can aid in one’s perception of which type of article most effectively presents all of the necessary information

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