Is honey a cough remedy? Refer to the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine (Dec. 2007) study of honey as a remedy for coughing, Exercise 2.40

(p. 79).

Recall that the 105 ill children in the sample were randomly divided into groups. One group received a dosage of an over-the-counter cough medicine (DM); another group received a dosage of honey (H). The coughing improvement scores (as determined by the children’s parents) for the patients in the two groups are reproduced in the table on p. 385. The pediatric researchers desire information on the variation in coughing improvement scores for each of the two groups.

a. Find a 90% confidence interval for the standard deviation in improvement scores for the honey dosage group.

b. Repeat part a for the DM dosage group.

c. Based on the results, parts a and

b, what conclusions can the pediatric researchers draw about which group has the smaller variation in improvement scores? (We demonstrate a more statistically valid method for comparing variances in Chapter 9.)

Transcribed Image Text:

Honey 12 11 15 11 10 13 10 4 15 16 9 14 10 6 12 12 8 12 9 11 15 10 15 9 13 Dosage: 10 8 11 8 12 10 DM 89512 7 7 7 9 12 10 11 634 8 12 12 4 12 13 7 10 13 9 46 9 4 Dosage: 9 12 7 6 4 4 10 15 9