Lab 7: Organ Donation
Background: Johnson and Goldstein (2003) describe an experiment where researchers wrote an online survey that asked people to imagine they have moved to a new state and are applying for a driver’s license. As part of this application, they were to decide whether to become an organ donor (the response variable). Some people were randomly assigned to be told one of three default options (the explanatory variable):
- “Opt in”: Subjects were told that the default option in the state was not to be a donor (these people would then need to “opt in” to the organ donation program if they wanted to participate),
- “Opt out”: Subjects were told the default option in the state was to be a donor (these people would need to then “opt out” if they did not want to participate in organ donation),
- “Neutral”: There was no prior default option, the group was just asked whether they would like to be an organ donor (the “neutral” group).
Johnson and Goldstein recruited participants for their study through various general interest bulletin boards on the internet. They offered an incentive of $4.00 for completing the online survey. Subjects were randomly assigned to be told one of three default options. Researchers counted the number of individuals in each group that said they would be organ donors, from a total of 161 responses.
Goals: In this lab, you will explore
- Different statistics for measuring the association between two categorical variables in a two-way table.
- The “shuffle to shuffle” variation in these statistics under random shuffling.
- The chi-square distribution as an approximation to the null distribution of the chi-square test statistic.
Word file: lab7report.doc
When you are ready, click Start to begin.
