Does alerting shoppers at a grocery store regarding the healthiness (or lack thereof) of energy dense snack foods change the shopping habits of overweight individuals? To answer this question, researchers randomly gave 42 overweight shoppers a recipe flyer that either contained health information or did not contain the health information. This type of intervention is referred to as priming. To determine purchases, the receipts of the participants were reviewed. Results of the study found that shoppers primed with the health- and diet-related words on the recipe bought significantly (almost 75%) fewer unhealthy snacks than those without the primes.
(a) What is the research objective?
(b) Who are the subjects?
(c) Explain why blinding is not possible in this study.
(d) What is the explanatory variable in the study
(e) The response variable was number of unhealthy snacks purchased. Is this quantitative or qualitative?
(f) Another factor in the study was weight status (normal weight vs overweight). Suppose all the normal weight subjects were given the flyer with the prime and overweight subjects were given the flyer without the prime. Explain how confounding would play a role in the study.