Chapter 4.2, Problem 73E

(a)

To determine

To find out what are the blocks in this experiment.

Answer to Problem 73E

The diagnoses have to be the different blocks.

Explanation of Solution

In this study, researchers want to study about that are the nurses as effective as the doctors at treating the patients with chronic conditions or not.

A randomized block design can group the subjects into blocks which have a common characteristic and thus a randomized block design allows us to take into account the change of one or more extra variables.

Thus, the patients were diagnosed with asthma, diabetes or high blood pressure while they were randomly assigned to a doctor or a nurse. The blocks cannot be the treatments but have to be characteristics of the patients and thus the diagnoses have to be the different blocks.

(b)

To determine

To explain why a randomized block design is preferable to a completely randomized design in this context.

Explanation of Solution

The patients were diagnosed with asthma, diabetes or high blood pressure while they were randomly assigned to a doctor or a nurse. The blocks are the different diagnoses.

It would be much more difficult to compare the result within in a completely randomized experiment, because the person’s health and the satisfaction of the patient could be strongly related to their diagnoses.

A randomized block design is more preferable because there will be a lot less variability within a diagnosis block and it will be then a lot easier to compare the effect of the type of care on the response variables.

(c)

To determine

To explain what advantages and disadvantages would this offer.

Explanation of Solution

If we suppose that there are only the diabetes patients that have to be examined but the patients are very large then the advantages for this will be that we have to be focus on only one type of diagnosis and the study can be done in a very less time and the results can be compared easily with much less of work. But the disadvantages are that there will be biasness in the study as there can be very much differentiation in the diagnoses and this will result that the nurses can help the patients of the diabetes much easily than the other diseases that can occur. So it will result is biased result.